Slashdot Mirror
Physicists Promise Wireless Power
StrongGlad writes "The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at MIT have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power wirelessly to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players. In a nutshell, their solution entails installing special 'non-radiative' antennae with identical resonant frequencies on both the power transmitter and the receiving device. Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed. The system currently under development is designed to operate at distances of 3 to 5 meters, but the researchers claim that it could be adapted to factory-scale applications, or miniaturized for use in the 'microscopic world.'"
What would happen if these were used on highways to power electric cars? Batteries still only return a tenth of the energy put into charging them, so directly conveying power to automobiles would be interesting indeed.
Ummm ... I don't know if you're really unaware of the counter-argument here, but this has nothing to do with heating or not. The plain and simple fact is that DNA does not interact with light at microwave/radiowave frequencies. Therefore DNA can't get damaged by cell phone radiation. Therefore, it doesn't give you cancer. I'm still not aware of any non-crackpot scientific studies that show any evidence of tumors being caused by cell phones. If you can come up with a reference to this guy, I'd be happy to take a look, but he sure sounds like a crackpot to me.
You're not alone. It's amazing how the man who is largely responsible for the use of AC power in our society, (Edison tried to champion DC because AC with all it's complex maths was too difficult to understand!), and the radio, (Marconi basically just used Tesla's insights to deliver a viable product for the war effort in WWI), goes unheralded.
There's a reason for this. Tesla worked in such a way which would have exposed the world to ways of thinking about reality which lead to freedom. --Despite his push for exactly the kind of power distribution system described in this article, such thinking would have eventually led to an understanding that all matter, (including elements of the human nervous system), resonates at specific frequencies. This would have led people to question things like cell phones a little more carefully before accepting them.
I've looked and looked, but I cannot find the reference I originally read many years ago now. . . His discovery of the radio was sparked by an incident where he was instantly aware that his mother who was in another country at the time, had just experienced a severe trauma. This experience is what caused him to think along the lines of sympathetic resonance. The science book people of today don't like guys who talk about such things. Again, it's about withholding freeing knowledge from the populace so that they are more easily controlled.
-FL
Not sure if this guy should be modded up or not since he is so rude. However, he makes a good point concerning near field and far field. I worked on a project as an undergraduate to build a near field microscope. Basically you run light through a piece of optical fiber that has a special needle-with-a-little-hole-in-the-tip end on it. As the light wave propagated from the tip, it would start out small, several times smaller than the wavelength of the light. The result was that the light would interact with features much smaller than the wavelength of the light. By moving the tip across the sample in a grid like fashion and detecting the reflected or transmitted light, it is possible to build a raster image of the sample in extremely high detail. I wouldn't be surprised if the effect were not common in nature and perhaps our own skin could cause it to happen. If that is the case, then it's possible that cell-phone radiation could interact with DNA or other small organelles which are needed for cell reproduction.