Researchers at MIT have a product in development that is a tiny gas turbine engine that can produce up to 10 Watts of power. String some together and you can run laptops with that kind of power. One of these 10 Watt engines is just the size of a quarter. So what you are left with is a very small power source that can run much longer than any current battery can, estimated at 10x longer by weight.
MIT has published a brief news release on it here. And while they have verified the function of the individual parts, they have not yet made a complete working model. They expect to achieve that by the end of the year.
The scale that they built on is pretty incredible when you think of all the required parts for an engine. And this is no wimpy little device, the turbine blades spin at 20k revolutions per second. It is no real surprise that research this focused and well-funded is underwritten by the military, but I think this is another one of their finds that may have real world applications. I am not quite sure where the fuel tank is for this thing, or how you refill it, but it probably gets pretty good mileage.
