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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.'"
I can't see
that's why you're not a genius.
Actually, the ironic thing is, if this is using Tesla's principles, it's extremely efficient. Maybe not as much as copper wire, but still rather higher than would be expected.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
now the people driving around in vans stealing my wireless don't even have to stop to recharge their laptops.
... there might be health issues -- but I suspect there will be lawsuits whether there are health issues or not.
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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.
Surely that would be a battery?
Even cell phones are proved to cause cancer...
No, they're not. Cellular phones don't emit ionizing radiation, all their communications happen in the microwave band. This is not powerful enough to cause cell damage on its own. The thermal effects raise cell temperature a fraction of a degree on the surface of the head (an order of magnitude less than the change experienced by standing in sunlight), and the non-thermal effects show no rigorous evidence of genetic damage. Now, near a base station, the situation is a little different, but don't try to scare John Q. Citizen with unfounded FUD about cellular phones causing cancer.
More info here.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
My understanding was that it wasn't pursued because Tesla marketed it as "Free Power" and no company was interested in giving people free anything at that time. Oh, wait, nothing's changed.
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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.
Ummm ... I don't know if you're really unaware of physics here, but if you stick a mouse in a microwave and turn the power to 11, the mouse sort of dies.
The absorption frequencies of DNA might not specifically match cellphone radiative frequencies, but high-power microwave radiation absolutely is dangerous to living tissue. Water absorbs very nicely at most microwave frequencies, and thermally-induced damage to water-containing tissues means the cell has to repair the damage. The thermal damage may be to the DNA, and it may be just to random proteins in the cell, but either way the cell has to start translating/transcribing, and when DNA is unravelled and depaired for transcription, there's a much greater chance of damage to the DNA happening from random processes, free radicals, stuff like that.
The question is: does sufficient damage happen to living tissue from radiation at the frequency and power density seen in cellphones, and I don't think anyone has positively answered that question yet.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.