Nanopower and MEMS...

NIST Photo

In our bodies, an electrolyte "any substance containing free ions that make the substance electrically conductive." (Wikipedia) Our muscles and neurons respond to this when we replenish it with a solution that has a salt like sodium, potassium, calcuim, magnesium (ibid). It made the University of Florida famous (Gatorade), and most likely quite wealthy.

It turns out you can be too thin—especially if you’re a nanoscale battery. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Maryland, College Park, and Sandia National Laboratories built a series of nanowire batteries to demonstrate that the thickness of the electrolyte layer can dramatically affect the performance of the battery, effectively setting a lower limit to the size of the tiny power sources.* The results are important because battery size and performance are key to the development of autonomous MEMS—microelectromechanical machines—which have potentially revolutionary applications in a wide range of fields.

NIST Tech Beat: Nanopower: Avoiding Electrolyte Failure in Nanoscale Lithum Batteries