By taking a different tack, Lilliputian Systems, a four-year-old Wilmington, Massachusetts firm, has produced a matchbox-size fuel cell that can put out enough electricity to run a laptop computer for days.

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By taking a different tack, Lilliputian Systems, a four-year-old Wilmington, Mass. firm, has produced a matchbox-size fuel cell that can put out enough electricity to run a laptop computer for days.

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A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away).

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But building a giant battery using dry-cell technology would require thousands of individual cells - about the size of a soft drinks can - to be strung together in a massive installation.

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Encountering a life-size model of a jail cell, visitors can go in and shut the door, to imagine what solitary confinement must have been like.

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Each submunition is the size of a D-cell battery with a distinctive white ribbon, and the design of their fuze system makes each one very sensitive and liable to detonate if disturbed.

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One fuel-cell factory, however, could make propulsion systems for every size and shape of vehicle.

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Before my serendipitous encounter, I had my eye on the Motorola 89442N Universal External Cell Phone Battery, a pack about the size of a phone with a bantam micro-USB arm.

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He is working with Quake to create a thumb-size chip that can automatically catalog the genes and proteins inside a single stem cell.

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