In a Los Alamos, NM, industrial park not far from the laboratory birthplace of the atomic bomb, Robert Hockaday sits in the cluttered lab of his startup company Manhattan Scientifics, holding a business-card-sized patch of clear plastic. Closer inspection shows a circuit-board-like pattern of black platinum and ruthenium printed on either side. The contraption is the innards of a five-centimeter-by-13-centimeter power plant that generates its own electricity using methanol as fuel. It may not look like much at first glance, but it's one member of a new class of tiny power packs that is ready to explode onto the market-and that just might annihilate one of the world's most ubiquitous technologies, the battery.

These miniature power plants, called micro fuel cells, promise a huge power boost for portable electronics ranging from cell phones to laptop computers to future generations of power-hungry, Web-enabled handheld devices. Today's best lithium-ion cell-phone batteries provide an average of only four hours of talk time; micro fuel cells could provide up to 20 hours of talk time. And after that, instead of plugging in the cell phone overnight, or swapping batteries, you'd just snap in a new methanol cartridge.