A collaboration between three universities is working to create a battery that is capable of powering microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The work is especially important because no viable battery currently exists for these tiny devices. The three-dimensional battery will be a departure from current battery designs, which stack "positive and negative electrodes... like sheets of paper." As more electrodes are stacked to make a higher capacity battery, the size and weight increases dramatically. A short research paper describes the design of the 3-D battery, which uses densely packed rods to achieve better energy storage per volume. While the work is still in its early stages, the potential of 3-D batteries for powering microscopic devices is perhaps the most promising yet proposed.