It’s a common situation for those who use their cellphones regularly throughout the workday, or for field workers who make liberal use of that battery-draining maps app: By the time the afternoon rolls around, the phone is sitting at a 40 percent charge, and there’s no time to leave it plugged in. But luckily for frequent cell phone users, a California teenager may have just cracked the code on that pesky dead battery problem.

According to ABC News, eighteen-year-old Esha Khare recently won an Intel Young Scientist Award (to the tune of $50,000, no less) for a device that could reportedly charge a cellphone in less than 30 seconds. Khare’s device is a tiny gadget with enough energy storage capability to power an LED light. According to the teenager, several companies have shown interest in the device as a means of beating the cell phone battery problem, or even cutting down the charge time for battery-operated vehicles.

Other details surrounding the device remain unclera, but tech gurus at geeksaresexy.com determined that the gadget is small and flexible enough to fit into fabric and durable enough to last roughly 10,000 charge cycles.

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If that’s the case, the futuristic dream of a self-charging cell phone may not be too far in the future. That said, some experts are downplaying the amount of testing and revamping required for the device to be a viable product. Khare has yet to run a successful battery charge test (her interviews merely cite the potential of the device to do so), and it’s unclear whether the technology is meant to replace the current slate of phone batteries or power them externally.

The other winner of a Young Scientist Award with Khare was Henry Lin of Shreveport, Louisiana, who received a $50,000 prize for “simulating thousands of clusters of galaxies” to allow scientists to “better understand the mysteries of astrophysics: dark matter, dark energy and the balance of heating and cooling in the universe’s most massive objects,” an Intel statement noted.