For the lead story in the July Departments pages of National Geographic magazine, photographer Adam Voorhes was tasked with a perplexing assignment: to make a photograph of a miniature wind turbine 1.8 mm tall, or rather, about half the length of a grain of rice.

“All you can see is this little line and you can see that there are three fan blades connected to it. Everything else is completely microscopic.”

Developed by a team of electrical engineers at The University of Texas, Arlington, this miniature wind turbine, whose detail (such as the holes in the fan blades) in Adam’s photograph is unseeable to the naked eye, can generate electric power from ambient wind. The idea is that