Slashdot Mirror
MIT Wirelessly Powers a Lightbulb
kcurtis writes "According to the Boston Globe, MIT Researchers have powered a light bulb remotely. The successful experiment lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb. Details about WiTricity, or wireless electricity, are scheduled to be reported today in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. 'The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wireless energy transfer. Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt - the 29m high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York - failed when he ran out of money. Others have worked on highly directional mechanisms of energy transfer such as lasers. However, unlike the MIT work, these require an uninterrupted line of sight, and are therefore not good for powering objects around the home.'"
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Apparently the power supply failed.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I want a wireless lightbulb hanging above my head, for when I have good ideas.
5s good sir
How does this differ from induction?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
No longer having to search for an ethernet cable or phone jack for my modem was great! In a few years, I won't have to battle against the hippie-chick mac users in the coffee shop for one of the tables next to one of the three electrical outlets in the joint! The only problem is, I wouldn't call my computer a, "lap top," anymore, as I wouldn't want to put any device that is recharged wirelessly anywhere near my, ... um,... "equipment."
How is this for efficiency? Can you actually beat a copper wire since there wouldn't be resistance? What sort of distances does this work over?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
This just screams cancer. I Hope I don't unwittingly end up sitting between the device and the energy transmitter of one of these things.
--
My most recent journal entry: wait, Slashdot used to be fun!? @#$!@, I missed it.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
imagine what having this kind of energy bouncing off you in your home all night might do...
This isn't really the first lightbulb to be lit remotely. Flourescents can be lit by an EM field.... so in a microwave, or under highpower lines:
http://www.boxyit.com/r/index.htm
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thraktuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Nicoli Tesla, who claimed to be able to do this. Now, he might have been insane, but he was a genius. I fully believe he did the exact same thing, although probably wasted a lot more energy than they did, and for a much higher cost to create.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Haven't you already been able to do this with a fluorescent tube under a high tension power line?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Lets tag this article under: cancer
(;
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
I'm tired of mistakes like this:
The successful experiment to lit a 60-watt light bulb
It should be "to lite a 60-watt light bult." Duh?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I think technologies such as wireless electricity, are among the many technologies which can also be dangerous as weapons.
How exactly would anyone stop wireless electric weapons? Not easily.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90YsTGklRqA
Nope, never seen one of those before.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I mean - wireless power means such freedom - low cost infrastructure to third world countries, possibly power to the moon?? Simply awesome.
when I walk past do any devices I may have in my shoulder bag or pockets get fried, or maybe whats left of my hair gets to stand on end?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
In any case - not being able to look at the site, hard to tell but it's old snow - almost a century if that's what they do.
Actually, there is/was a law (in DE) to make it illegal to light your house by "wireless" electricity near a radio transmitter. Just put in two wires on a bulb and it lights up.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml
I think Tesla did the same with high voltage, ie ramping up the voltage till it arced where he wanted.
Less practical but much more fun for the office.
Hertz did a similar thing:z #Electromagnetic_research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Rudolf_Hert
probably at around 50 MHz rather than 10 MHz but pretty similar. He didn't have a 60W bulb to power at the time (Where's Edison when you need him?) but he got a *spark* at similar distance. He even made it work through a box.
I know, the difference is related to how the filed is/was generated but this certainly isn't new.
n6gn
And it was very efficient no doubt..
MABASPLOOM!
The maximum allowable field leaked from a microwave is 1W/m^2.
How can 60W induced in a coil much smaller possibly meet any regulatory requirements?
BTW, try to stand under a high power line with a fluorescent tube at night, and it will light up. No coil needed.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
beat them to it
You can't take the sky from me...
Hell, back in the 60s, I had a monstrous WWII surplus transmitter, a BC-610 by name. This thing was the size of a large washing machine, and had vacuum tubes in it the size of your head. It would produce a vertiable torrent of RF. As a young ham operator, I was a little sketchy on the principles and practice of proper antenna load and impedance matching, so the whole feedline was radiating, and causing standing waves in all of the house wiring...in my house and the houses around ours. Enough power was intercepted by house wiring that the incandescent bulbs in light fixtures would glow dimly when I was on the air...even though they were turned off. You could hear my voice on telephones for approximately 10 houses radius, since non-linearities in the old phones were enough of a rectifier to do AM detection on the signal the phoen wiring picked up. Fluorescent tubes in my house & my immediate neighbours would light with a strange plasma looking pattern, caused by the structure of the standing waves present. And forget watching TV or listening to the radio in the neighborhood - my voice was heard on radios louder than the program material, and TV pictures were obliterated by a dancing pattern of hum bars. Enough complaining got back to my parents that I could only operate late late late at night....anyway, you can see why I am not that impressed with the concept of wireless power transmission...I did it in person over 40 years ago...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Please, for the love of all that as good, don't point that thing at my nuts.
Tesla was doing this a generation ago.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
how true, its no wonder GE bought all his ideas and buried them
if only bucky fuller and n tesla could have worked on the world electircal grid together
back in the day we didnt have no old school
What on earth do you server chimps think is a useful motivation for researchers if money and respect are both off the table?
Thanks for convenience, but in this day and age we are really working to bring our energy efficiency up rather than waste any more. I would prefer a standard for DC, low voltage charges to become as widely accepted as one for electrical outlets. Hopefully, every car, airplane and coffee table will have one to use then.
First off, Nicola Tesla was not insane. Secondly, he *did* do this, many times in fact.
Personally, I am a bit miffed at the MIT folks for not giving credit where credit is due. This is the second article I have seen in the last month or two on this topic and they hardly even mention the fact that this is a key Tesla invention that was in fact accomplished by him and repeatably demonstrated. To read the articles one would think that the folks at MIT just sat down last week and invented this all by themselves when it is simply not true.
It *is* the case that Tesla is a "fan favorite" of the same type of folks that like to believe in free energy machines and it *is* the case that his *commercial* attempt at providing wireless power was never finished, but the technique and the methodology behind it was sound and I think even patented by Tesla.
To ignore his achievements, simply because many years after his death the man has gained some tertiary association with the lunatic fringe is a bit outrageous to my mind. The particular article referenced here even goes out of it's way to say that Tesla tried wireless power but "failed" (even though they mention off-handedly that it was only through lack of funds, not through any technical problems).
Tesla invented this technique, plain and simple. And those articles that fail to mention it are doing history a great dis-service.
Wasn't Nicola Tesla doing this kind of thing about a century ago?
Sheesh, I did this and anyone can. (Not to take away from Tesla, whom obviosly invented it)Build yourself a Tesla Coil and bring a Fluoro bulb near it while online.
Actually I'm pretty sure it's an idiot with a tweaked out auto CB and a 1000W linear but the results are the same.
Uncle Charlie is as useless as ever.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is a lousy article. First, anybody could wirelessly light a flourescent for the last few decades (or century really). Almost any college could also build a setup that caused a regular lightbulb to glow if they wanted to, at any time in the last, say 70 years.
What they are really showing is a test of their "put your equipment close and we'll figure out what we should do to charge it" technology, not "beamed power". We have pretty well understood electromagnetism at that level for a long time.
Anyone who has had any experience with a Tesla Coil will know that if you hold a flourescent lightbulb near the coil whilst it is discharging, the bulb will light up. The faster your Tesla Coil cycles, the more of an appearence of "on" the bulb will have. It works because the coil emits electromagnetic pulses each time the current makes the jump from anode to cathode.
The pulse ionizes the bulb's internal gases and produces a plasma around the internal filament. The mercury is then ionized and begins to emit UV rays.
This really isn't news. Hell, the article talks about Tesla's efforts, which are about a century old.
This is the exact same principle used in RFID, scaled appropriately, and used to power a bulb instead of a chip. How is this new?
I always thought of Creationism as the Raving Right's version of the Loony Left's Anthropogenic Global Warming-brightmal
Wacom are powering their tablet pens and mice wirelessly via simple electromagnetic induction. And they patented the hell out of it.
Just saying.
How is this different than holding a fluorescent light tube (60W) under the high tension lines -- except that they're more than 2m away?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If I'm not mistaken, didn't Nicolie Tesla (sp) do this over a hundred yers ago? Think they'll get the ball ligtning trick down next?
Did nobody learn anything from The Quiet Earth?
When you die at the exact moment the field goes active, you are transformed to some alternate dimension.
MIT must be stopped!
Maybe because it's not a microwave or existing device with specific regulations they can get away with it? Just a guess.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
To ignore his achievements, simply because many years after his death the man has gained some tertiary association with the lunatic fringe is a bit outrageous to my mind. The particular article referenced here even goes out of it's way to say that Tesla tried wireless power but "failed" (even though they mention off-handedly that it was only through lack of funds, not through any technical problems). Speaking of people picking on Tesla, dis you ever see Edison's FUD about the dangers of alternating current?
My own conspiracy theory about Tesla is that his lack of funding was due to his old nemesis.
You can't take the sky from me...
Laser conduits for power??? Finally!
Back in the 70's when there was a trend of using CB it was commone to take a florescent tube light and putting it near the antenna, keying the mic and watching the bulb light up with no wires attached, actually hand held.
Also you could take a regular house light bulb and throw it up in front of a military radio transmitter/disk and it would go off like a camera flash.
What this means is that for there to be wireless power transmission there is probably something that can cook a human too.
As a physics student I took an interest in Tesla and if you haven't read the book titled "A Man Out of Time", consider reading it. Tesla was building a tower to transmit power between the US and Europe (across the large ocean). The reason this is important is that is not accomplished by induction, but through some other means. Tesla's other means was probably really, really, high voltage as he was producing with his Tesla coils. Making high voltage is not a mystery, but directly it safely and then dropping it to a safe and usable potential is very difficult.
In short, this is NOT the same as holding a flourescent tube under a high voltage powerline. The MIT method uses controlled power tranmission over larger distances (2m or 6ft). The technique uses resonance frequency but has 40% loss, which is very bad meaning it is only 60% efficient. Many modern PSU (Power Supply Units) are 90%+ efficient. Unless they increase the efficiency, the power industry probably won't be jumping on board anytime soon.
40% efficient = 2.5 times more green house gasses?
Way to go guys.
So will our kids be perplexed by all jokes of the form 'How many X does it take to screw in a light bulb?'
Are Tesla's patents still valid? If so, the guys at MIT may be in a bit of trouble. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The movie The Prestige explores that at some length.
rj
Relax man, its not like Soljacic has a band named after him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(band)
Hurray! We are one small step closer to the Protoss!
The major breakthrough though is the ability to select which device will be powered. Tesla did nothing of the sort and just created wild electromagnetic fields which then were no big deal but now would render some equipment useless and additionally destroy some other equipment. The resonating frequency in this case can be much lower and thus less volatile, but when "stacked" it still produces the same result.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
And people are worried about cancer from what are extremely low level signal-level only electromagnetic radiation from things like cell phones and power lines. Hah, they're tjust going to love this.
Well, if placebo medicine can cure cancer, (numerous documented cases, and not only cancer)
why can't an unfounded fear or belief that cellphones cause cancer actually CAUSE cancer?
Or, perhaps it CAN cause cancer, in people particularly sensitive to it for X reasons.
We've spent a lot of money researching this phenomena, but that doesn't discount the
possibility that we've been looking in the wrong way. Or *intentionally not finding it.
It took 50 years for asbestos to be tagged. And 20 for hormone replacement.
Can you imagine the potential liability if cell phones did, in fact, cause cancer?
We have seen how they handle such situations, before.
...how they can control power consumption. Imagine a hundred wireless electricity customers (WiTricity hackers) trying to tap into the grid.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
The intensity of the electromagnetic fields that are needed to send a sizable amount of energy is strong enough to induce serious eddy currents in the conductive interior of the human body. It would be nice to get rid of the rat's nest of power cables under my desk, but I wouldn't want to live inside a microwave oven either. Of course, they may have discovered a way to send the energy using thalaron (did I spell it correctly ?) rather than electromagnetic radiation, but, if I remember correctly, that one is harmful too.
Hertz did a similar thing ...probably at around 50 MHz
Never 50 MHz. Hertz would have done it at 50 megacycles per second - he couldn't do anything anything in hertz in those days. Cycles per second was renamed by the IEC to hertz (Hz) after Hertz some 30+ years Hertz did his last wave. Sorry, I know the truth hurts. It also Tildens and Avises.
When do we get the lightning rifles?
lol: You see no door there!
This is exactly how transformers work (the power converters, not the robots); it's also similar to how the radio in your car works. Faraday was doing this stuff in the 1800s, I don't see what the big deal is.
>|<*:=
A story from my childhood...
When I was a kid my dad worked for the old AT&T. Seems like one day the rural telephone wires suddenly got enough juice on it to light up a light bulb from tens of miles away.
It turned out that overhead power lines were causing severe induction problems.
Remember, this was back in the days of crossbar switches. Things are much different now.
s/(\s[Aa]) ([AEIOUaeiou])/$1n $2/
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
I thought these sorts of experiments went by the term "death ray"? I'd be afraid to sit on a metal bench in Starbucks or waiting for the bus without a nagging fear, "Do I smell something burning? Is it my brain?" Or at least those were my biases before I read the article at least :-)
I came across this technology completely serendipitously a few weeks ago on How Things Work. There was a link to "wireless electricity" off the main page and I followed it and they discussed the MIT patents and I downloaded several different patents in the field. They were all from within the last few years and involved resonance coupled with induction.
What surprised me was the lack of imagination in the applications. They were talking about remotely recharging cell phones and MP3 players or letting you move around electronics without needing to find a plug. Well those are all fine ideas and quite obvious indeed but I saw nothing about the one area that seemed to potentially benefit the most from this: robotics.
All the pieces are there in robotics except for the one that this technology addresses: lightweight, high-density power. Oh, and let's not forget cheap.
Powering the lights without wires is a fine thing to do. I'm all for it. But what is the high energy deensity application that absolutely requires mobility? It seems to me that there is one in particular and that is robotics.
Moreover, this technology has a limitation of range that actually becomes a feature when applied to robotics. As we know all too well in the age of Iragi battle drones Asimov's laws of robotics are a fantasy relic of a time that couldn't imagine how software would really develop. The truth is, robots can be dangerous and this kind of technology effectively puts a leash on their range. They can do whatever within the home, but they can't just go out and go for a walk. It's a classic example of a limitation becoming a feauture.
So how would it solve the immigration issue?
I just mentioned this range limitation. So then, how could we use this for agricultural robots that would alleviate the need for low paid illegal immigrant farm labor? No problem. Obviously tractors bring their own power sources into the field. So, power in the field is not a problem. You would simply have gangs of robots attatched to resonant inductor power modules hanging off arms of the tractor. Say each tractor controls six platoons of robotic field hands with six resonant inductor orbs. They could work twenty four hours shifts. One tractor and labor gang could harvest dozens of farms per season in a timely manner.
If you need higher power, that's not a problem. There's no reason this technology is limited to 110volts. You can use 600V or 1200V. As much as you need. Your robotic workers would be as powerful as necessary.
Not only would it eliminate the need for foreign labor, it would also reduce the need to use high impact farming techniques such as posioning the soil with bromide gas and laying down plastic mulch. These things are done in the name of economy because it's too expensive to have human labor go through a farm and pick weeds. Monocrops are also planted for the same economic considerations. By dramatically shifting the labor equation you would enable a vast increase in the use of organic farming techniques.
The implications of this technology are far more revolutionary than re-charging an MP3 player.
About ten years ago, my dad came home from work and told me about a practical joke someone had played at work.
Some engineers had called the technician, complaining that the light in their office wouldn't turn off. The technician came, and no, it didn't turn the bulb off. He attached the multimeter to the switch... the power was being turned on and off by the switch. He attached it to the bulb itself... power was being cut. So he removed the bulb: it stayed on even when unplugged.
The engineers had pointed an active magnetron at the bulb.
Soon, wardrivers will be able to steal power from homes they pass by, reducing their own energy bills. :D
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Slashdot is not a person. Slashdot is a community, a community whose members often take wildly differing viewpoints on issues. Until you show me one person who has made both types of comments you mention, your point is worthless.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
What's so new about this?
What?
The way this summary is written, you'd think that they're suggesting Tesla's coils need a direct line of sight. No. No they don't.
This isn't *LIKE* Tesla's work, it's a complete rip off of it. Magnetic field? Yep. That would be induction guys. Welcome to pinnacle of the 1920's.
They'll never be able to solve the power loss & drop off without something crazy... like Wardencliffe.
It took them a 100 years to catch up with Tesla. Lot's of others are referencing Tesla but some seem to think it was just one of the things attributed to Tesla that may or may not be true. We call them flourecent light bulbs. Want to reproduce what he was doing get a vandergraph genrator and walk a florescent tube towards it. A miracle! Light. The process is well documented what's lacking is a practical safe means of applying it. If you think you got a shock off of carpet try a static generator. What seem to be the revealation is doing it with a low efficency bulb. That's technology for you we reproduced the experiment just not as well so it's an advancement. Go down to Walmart, pick up several compact florescents and put them under the same conditions. You save a few hunderd grand and they'll draw less power.
Looks a lot like a transformer with a large air gap to me...
s fer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer/
is wireless energy transmission new?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_tran
hmm... maybe not...
30s of wikiing...: the question I have: is what is new here?
Is it that they are using low frequency long wave lengths?
Even then... power constraints will be real, and I wonder about efficiency...
and the 2 foot coil attached to my cell phone or laptop certainly
won't improve its portability...
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
It takes how many MIT researchers to change a light bulb? I mean, seriously, what are we paying these people for?
I think that the term "mad genius" might apply in Tesla's case . He was definitely a fascinating guy who made Edison look like an egotistical putz - read and be amazed. Not mentioned here, but he allegedly also had a theory that with the right resonant frequency, he could split the earth in two.
The FCC has (had?) an exemption that allows RF testing on the site of a college / university.
If you tried this off-campus, you would be toast. The BBC article mentioned a 40% efficiency. For a 60 W light bulb, this implies about 150 W of total input power and 90 W of losses. Some of these losses must be RF losses. The device must be over the 1 W maximum transmitter power limit of the FCC for personal use, assuming the FCC would even permit the device.
The HF frequency range (10 MHz) is used extensively for communications. A number of amateur radio operators are likely to be unhappy if someone is using a device like this near their radio receivers.
And radio waves are comprised of both electric and magnetic fields.
Still, don't automatically tag "cancer", just tag "ambulance chasing scumbag lawyer magnet."
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Tesla invented this technique, plain and simple. And those articles that fail to mention it are doing history a great dis-service.
Tesla invented a lot of things that we take for granted. AC power generation (particularly 3-phase synchronous generation). 3-phase electric motors, wireless anything - he was Marconi's assistant or somesuch for a while and Marconi took the credit. Without Tesla you wouldn't be sitting here reading this!
The reason Tesla isn't credited with as much as he deserves is because at the time large commercial interests couldn't do what he was doing even though they were throwing large dollars at the problem. It was easier to just steal his work (which he nearly always left in the public domain), take credit for it and then profit.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Until you show me one person who has made both types of comments you mention, your point is worthless.
OK, I'll fess up, it was me! I made both comments ... but then again I made the parent comment as well %).
Personally, I am a bit miffed at the MIT folks for not giving credit where credit is due. This is the second article I have seen in the last month or two on this topic and they hardly even mention the fact that this is a key Tesla invention that was in fact accomplished by him and repeatably demonstrated. To read the articles one would think that the folks at MIT just sat down last week and invented this all by themselves when it is simply not true.
p df
The opening paragraph of their earlier paper:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0611/0611063.
In the early days of electromagnetism, before the electrical-wire grid was deployed, serious interest and effort was devoted (most notably by Nikola Tesla [1]) towards the development of schemes to transport energy over long distances without any carrier medium (e.g. wirelessly). These efforts appear to have met with little success. Radiative modes of omni-directional antennas (which work very well for information transfer) are not suitable for such energy transfer, because a vast majority of energy is wasted into free space. Directed radiation modes, using lasers or highly-directional antennas, can be efficiently used for energy transfer, even for long distances (transfer distance LTRANSLDEV, where LDEV is the characteristic size of the device), but require existence of an uninterruptible line-of-sight and a complicated tracking system in the case of mobile objects. Rapid development of autonomous electronics of recent years (e.g. laptops, cell-phones, house-hold robots, that all typically rely on chemical energy storage) justifies revisiting investigation of this issue. Today, we face a different challenge than Tesla: since the existing electrical-wire grid carries energy almost everywhere, even a medium-range (LTRANS fewLDEV) wireless energy transfer would be quite useful for many applications. There are several currently used schemes, which rely on non-radiative modes (magnetic induction), but they are restricted to very close-range (LTRANSLDEV) or very low-power (~mW) energy transfers [2,3,4,5,6].
That was my first thought, too. "Hey, I can stand under some power lines with a fluorescent tube and it'll light up. Can I have a grant now?" Heh...
Just as long as they don't make lighbulbs that zap Redshirts who get in the way of the power transmission like that psycho AI from Star Trek http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/M-5/.
all that energy in the air won't cause any health side-effects to us humans at all, no sir...
Let me get this straight. These guys make an LC tank out of the two sides of a transformer and call it something new??? This is ridiculus. It IS induction. You create a fluctuating magnetic flux with the first coil and let that flux pass through a second coil. It unavoidably generates an electromotive force (voltage) and hence current in the second coil as explained by a fellow named Michael Faraday about 100 years ago. It's called a transformer and it most definitely is induction. Using a resonant tank on the two sides is icing on the cake and common in alot of applications. Unless I'm missing something subtle, this is screamingly obvious and decidedly not new. These guys must be the laughingstock of the electrical engineering department. I cant wait till they try to patent this (then again, alot of perpetual motion gizmos have slipped through the patent office.)
And 10 MHz will radiate. It'll radiate like hell. Your AM radio works at only a few hundred kHz.
---Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
They powered a whole light bulb, what is MIT coming to?
http://www.richardbox.com/
Deleted
As someone with a robotics degree from Carnegie Mellon, I feel to compelled to point out that you're ignoring just how abjectly stupid and incompetent robots still are. We do not have anywhere near the level of AI needed for robot farmers to deal with the messy, filthy, ever-changing world of a farm. Automatic tractors that can plow fields or spray crops, yes. Weeding and picking fruit, no. Power isn't the problem; intelligence is.
Uncle Fester did this back in the '60s. Must have been a student of Tesla!
Just because Tesla was a genius doesn't mean he wasn't also insane. He invented a great many useful and wonderful things that are very important to the infrastructure of modern society, and was at times denied credit by jealous and antagonistic rivals, but he had many eccentricities, particularly in his later life, that point to him not having been entirely well in the head. He refused to eat where others could see him, freaked out about other people's hair touching him, and generally seems to have had serious problems maintaining normal interpersonal relationships with other people.
From TFA:
"This is a characteristic of what is known as the "far field", the field seen more than one wavelength from the device. At a distance of less than one wavelength the field is almost entirely magnetic."
Sorry guys but this is entirely nonsense
The movie The Prestige explores that at some length.
Really? I should rent that!rj
You can't take the sky from me...
While power outlets are inconvenient, they have the nice property that you have to be on my... well, property... to plug something into them. Since the barrier this is trying to overcome is the focused area of other wireless power systems, it seems like my neighbours might move their laptops to the side of their house that's nearest mine and run up my bill. Not sure how you encrypt power transmission.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
That's because 60W isn't being radiated out. Instead the field in the article is an evanescent or nearfield, which is a static standing wave. Electrons in a conductor are described by a wavefunction which decays away to nearly nothing in an insulator such as a vacuum. However it does not reach 0 and hence can be found in the insulator. Now in this system they put another conductor nearby which happens to be a fit for the electrons in the transmitter coil and so the resonance bit in the article.
Therefore 60W isn't emitted but instead quantum tunnels over to the over coil.
The really annoying thing is that this really could have been done at any point in the last 100 years. In fact the same has been done with photons for decades.
If there is a real break through they are hiding it. If there is no break through, this press release is the poster child for needing to have peer review.
Great... now we get to live, or die, just like the movie "The Quiet Earth".
Let me see you put a fluorescent bulb in a microwave. If the mercury doesn't explode first I'll expect the metal ends of the tube to go before the phosphorous starts glowing. Yea, you can light it, for all of maybe two seconds before it explodes and sends your microwave to hell. And yes, I KNOW it could be done, the problem is - microwaves and metal tend to not mix very well unless you have a sufficient amount of water nearby to absorb most of the radiation.
On a side note, how much power do shortwave radio broadcast systems use? I've got a shortwave radio and I'm picking shit up from Russia and China. I've always wondered why cellphones use the microwave part of the spectrum and yet we need shitloads of repeater towers all over the place while I pick up signals from all over the world. I know the atmosphere reflects signals pretty well given some circumstances but still, I'm confused.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...highly directional mechanisms of energy transfer such as lasers. However, unlike the MIT work, these require an uninterrupted line of sight... Why not use optic cable to direct the laser. Oops..Tesla demonstrated this WAY before MIT by using a carbon button bulb, which is incandescent, wirelessly. The Carbon Bulb was invented by Tesla to get around Edison's patent on a wire-based incandescent bulb.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
He was not Marconi's assistant, or any some such. Marconi used Tesla's patents for his radio.
Sometimes when I'm working on projects things disappear, I suspect gremlins.
Who cares about cell phones and laptops... those are toys.
I'd like to see the day when power generated with a Candu reactor is wirelessly transmitted to my high performance electric car. Imagine a vehicle with absolutely no on board power whatsoever, incredible advantages. There are obvious limitations (offroad) but for urban travel and main national highways it is perfect.
I have often pondered exactly how to achieve this, I'm not sure that high frequency magnetic fields are the solution, but it is certainly a possibility worth exploring. The number of power transmission points could possibly be reduced by some minimal storage provided by flywheels.
The thought of 500 horsepower of electric motors without the weight overhead of batteries, gets me excited. I do not currently own an automobile, nor will I until such a solution is available. For now, the bicycle is still the most efficient and environmentally friendly solution.
...before the ThinkOfTheChildren lot come along and moan about "WiTricity" giving their kids brain cancer.
Tesla worked under Edison for a short while. When he left, he insulted the "throw it at a wall and see what sticks" methodology to Edison's labs. Tesla stated that if Edison's team ever bothered with a little theory now and then instead of relentless experiments, he would have fewer cases of that 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.
Tesla lit bulbs from a mile away, ~100 years ago. With a Tesla coil, when I was in high school, I lit a flourescent bulb from several feet away. What is so special about this?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
From the summary:
[...]The successful experiment lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb.Bullshit.
Electromagnetic transmission is still a physical connection. What did you think it was? A metaphysical connection?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
I've been doing this for years with my HF amateur rig and a florescent bulb. Now I just gotta wire my house into a huge antenna array, get my tinfoil hat ready and key the mic.
first useful comment to this story I've read.
and yes, I don't like to RTFA either.
What about the effect on bees and British children!! We're all doomed!!!
[Insert pithy quote here]
Yes, it is pretty neat that they could power a conventional off-the-shelf lightbulb wirelessly, but this is nothing 100% radical and new. In freshman-level Electromagnetism in college my professor (Prof. George Smoot of Nobel 2006 fame) demonstrated exactly this - a standard light bulb with two antennas sticking out of it could be powered wirelessly by EM waves. Nothing special, and hardly any "sophisticated" technology - an A.C. power source with antennas and a lightbulb with antennas aligned with the power source antennas.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
To VAXcat's comment here:
4 1&cid=19430481
p icture14.htm
W P010.htm
N F021.htm
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2377
[right fscking on]
And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
-Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie
First place Nicola Tesla broadcasted HF power around the world. [Colorado Springs, CO] - 1 wire, many bulbs.
At one point he so overloaded the local grid he burned up the Plant turbines, where upon he sent his assistants to rebuild it properly - no charge of course.
Fascinating man.
http://www.teslascience.org/archive/descriptions/
The City of Colorado Springs, CO ignores Tesla historically [think of what else resides there], I was at this very spot in '05 - the neighborhood is suburban, the people in the house that occupy this historic site - haven't got a clue of what they're sitting on. None of them do, "never heard of 'em."
Tesla's Wardenclyffe plant. [Wardenclyffe (now Shoreham) on Long Island]
http://www.teslascience.org/archive/descriptions/
Where Westinghouse, to whom Tesla had forgiven millions in royalties, abandoned him. Frightened that his AC empire would crumble.
See, Niagara Falls:
http://www.teslascience.org/archive/descriptions/
Truly the most. ignored. genius. ever.
~hylas
Yes. Yes. Dear God, yes.
First of all, Tesla is played brilliantly by David Bowie. But, more importantly than that, the movie... fucking... rocks...
"You're familiar with the phrase 'man's reach exceeds his grasp'? It's a lie: man's grasp exceeds his nerve." -Tesla from the film
Happy people make bad consumers.
To VAXcat:
4 1&cid=19433273
See:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2377
~hylas
"Now someone comes up with a remarkable breakthrough and you're bitching because it vaguely sounds like something you've heard of, except that you haven't bothered to RTFA to see why it's completely different."
... demonstrated in 1964, on the CBS Walter Cronkite News, a microwave powered helicopter that received all the power needed for flight from a microwave beam. ... In the 1969 to 1975 time period, Mr. Brown managed a program that increased the overall efficiency, or ratio of DC power out to DC power in, to a JPL certified efficiency of 54%, several times greater than generally expected. He was also technical director of a JPL Raytheon program that beamed power over a distance of one mile to a rectenna which intercepted a portion of the beam and converted it to 30 kilowatts of DC power with 84% efficiency."
I read the article. What is remarkable about this? What is the breakthrough? Even the article says that the breakthrough is merely that they had "followed through" what had been talked about previously. Which, frankly, is still really, really, wrong.
Here, have a look at this:
"William C. Brown
IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S): Bill Brown's Distinguished Career
What did the MIT group do? They lit a light bulb. How cute.
Sometimes, MIT gets in the news just because it is MIT.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
First they leeched my wireless internet. Then they started watching what I watch on my digital cable. Now they are going to take my power too? I see where this going. I will be waiting in the bushes next to my water spigot with a shotgun. Maybe a bear trap in my trashcan for good measure.
I thought Roombas were the first step to ubiquitous home robotics--or maybe the incarnation.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
40% sounds pretty awful for a 60W lightbulb you can easily run wires for. But for a car? Compared to not having to carry the weight of the battery, efficiency loss of recharging the battery, and as you mentionned, not having to refuel, a 40% efficiency sounds great.
Hope they put a wireless power grid in my city soon.
"Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless energy transfer..."
'Nuf said. Not anything new, and certainly not something I forsee being very useful in the future. Inductive electricty transfer is very well known in science, and if there was a good way to do what these people are attempting, it surely would've been seen in the past.
FWIW, the power plant down the road has hundreds of these 'wireless electricity transfer' devices all over their junction stations... they're called transformers.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Tesla worked under Edison for a short while.
There, he was an assistant or somesuch as I said. I couldn't remember who off the top of my head!!!
I drink to make other people interesting!
In his talk at a scientific meeting about a year ago, the professor who came up with this technology specifically mentioned Roomba as his motivation for the project. Apparently he owns several and finds them very useful. He actually used Roombas in slides shown during the talk and set the scale for preliminary calculations based on robots of that size.
Mods: Care to RTFA (the MIT link) before you moderate?
> According to the article, magnetic fields don't have any effect on the human body
An assertion completely invalidated by the use of "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" (TMS). Stick those three words into PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) and you'll get lots of references (some false positives, but plenty of true ones).
It's presently being used to treat things like depression. Not because it does anything beneficial, but rather because it induces overload into the neural circuits under the coil, effectively shutting that area off from organized neural processing. Until we were able to get better focus and so use less power, about all it was good for was inducing seizures. That's still what it does, just on a scale that doesn't involve uncontrolled spreading of the over-activation. Even when the power is subcritical for inducing the localized overload, it still causes negative effects like massive headaches. No matter what frequency this widget runs at, there's brain processes that operate at that frequency. The brain is an EM pink noise generator from 1 Hz (EEG) to at least 4 GHz (water molecule "squidge" rate, an essential component of membrane reactivity).
I've been on both ends of a TMS coil in the lab. I wouldn't have this technology in my house until it was cleared by the FDA.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"Give a scientist lots of money, and he will rediscover what has already been discoverd, in greater complexity and greater cost than ever before."
I ALREADY wirelessly power my toothbrush. Let me guess, the lightbulb has to be plugged into an adapter firt, right?
And there have been numerous cases of people getting in serious trouble who were powering their houses by mooching off of the electromagnetic fields that surround high voltage transmission lines.
Also, I remember lighting fluorescent tubes up by standing underneath transmission lines. We also had an artist who made a really cool art "sculpture" thing by sticking one end of the tubes into the ground.
I also remember wirelessly lighting clear glass tubes filled with neon and argon in 7th grade. No "adapter" required.
Idiots.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
...Is a fearsome amount of power to be putting into the air when people a still afraid of their 70milliwatt cell phone.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
Get in the way of that point to point beam of electricity and FRAP! You become a BBQed piece of meat. Yeah. Let's all adopt wireless power today! (Of course if it had some sort of communication protocol that is constantly asking "Are you there?" before sending a huge surge of electricity, the risk could be minimized. Do this every 10 seconds or so.)
Did this in fucking high school with a tesla coil and some fluoroescent bulbs.
Glad to see MIT has entered the 19-fucking-20's as well.
Welcome to 1920 MIT!
If we fully embrace nuclear power (and do it right* this time) then efficiency [b]could[/b] be less important then convenience.
Of course there's several hundred layers of mass public ignorance, greedy corporations and religious politicians who happen to be oil magnates in the way of that ever happening.
As I see it the only hope for the planet is Helium 3 reactors which could be sold to the public as a "clean start", even if the tangible benefits over existing nuclear power are mostly psychological.
{*} "Right" meaning the reactors aren't built in a mad hurry using mostly untested technology as part of a race to produce nuclear weapons.
No sig today...
I'll throw in some links to help this "discussion" out:
1) Article on the Tesla Coil
2) Where you can buy one
Hell, I thought of this at least 15 years ago before high school and people laughed at it. Truly, I am amazed when things like this are put forward as great new ideas, when they aren't. Like the front loading washing machine, for instance: My father sold those back in the 60's for god'd sake!
Have another look at the article, scroll down to the x-ray(ish) picture of the British plug, and look below it: 'Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries.' Has it, has it really? - This comment really blew my mind, I mean, how long have we even thought about energy running through wires? Then again, this is the BBC so they must be right, the Romans must have hated those damn cables everywhere! But I agree with some of the other posts, there's nothing new here (decades, not centuries), and it's never going to be very efficient. At a time when everybody is starting to worry about the environment we really shouldn't be throwing power into the air just so we can charge our phones without bothering to plug them in. For god's sake.
I can't be the only one that read "WiTricity" as "Witchery" and thought, "Yeah, that'd do it."
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
You just don't like them 'brown' people, do ya?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
They're using a different technique to avoid needing line of sight or be harmful to humans (the article even mentions the microwave beaming, and how you can also use it to cook a chicken - not really something you'd want in the home powering up those speakers, is it?)
"How cute they lit a light bulb." Right. Its exactly the same because the end result is the same. That could go for pretty much any story here, right? Faster processor? "Bah, we were crunching numbers in the 50s. Whats the big deal here?"
bad enough that you have to lock down your wi-fi - now you will have to lock down your electricity or the neighbors will use it
Cool - now I won't need that cellphone on my ear the whole day to "power" my brain....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
"..no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb." - please define physical connection! What is matter, what is energy, ..
Big deal Tesla did something far more impressive then that over 100 years ago he lite 100 light bulbs I think during the 1890s from over 20 miles away and again during the 1920s he powered an electric car to 80mph likely via induction coils in the track.
Nothing to see here move along.
I wanna eat a Flintstones vitamin with lotsa iron in it and then stand within two meters of this 30-meter wave transmitter and get magnetized, baby! Not only will I finally be a chick magnet but I'll easily be able to find my way north to the habitable zones when Global Warming hits the fan.
Anyone that thinks this is amazing should stab themselves in the face... Tesla only did this oh... almost 100 years ago!! Better yet, come stand under my 40meter dipole when i but about 1kw to it. I'm willing to bet you can tell what i'm sending in morse by the bulb turning on and off. At the very least, I'll know, becuase it lights up the florecent bulb in the kitchen.
I don't understand anything of what you are saying. Can you be more specific, and maybe give me the energy eigenstates of the time independent Schrödinger equation of this system?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I would just like to add a second recommendation for the Prestige. Its not a film about Tesla, but as a character, he features pretty prominently. It is IMO a truely excellent movie, one of the best I have seen for a while. Make sure you are reasonbly alert when watching it though. Many subtle things that can easily be missed.
How many MIT researchers does it take to light an bulb?
one on the laptop..
4 other thinking...
2 holding coils
1 holding the light bulb...
7!!
Now can't use this as a joke? :( Bad bad... :/
ghostbar page.
Although the 40% efficiency doesn't sound too bad (though it puts it at about 20% efficency between the power station and your laptop), that 60% loss of power is going on regardless of whether your laptop is using it or not.
I'd also love to know what this does to wireless data around the home. Constant high wattage frequency can't have zero side effects. IANAEE, but seriously - this is very old technology, the improvements that can be made for efficiency will be minimal, we're all better off abandoning this now.
with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb
Even radiowaves or laser constitute a physical connection, strictly speaking
Yupp, this is "well known" in antenna and microwave R&D circles. There are many theories, ranging from RF exposure to working odd hours... I have sired four girls vs. zero boys, and even though this is just one data point, the trend is very much obvious in departments I've worked.
BTW, the combination of WiTricity and Pendry looks like a marriage made in heaven -> Metamagical materials and cargo cult electromagnetics go together...
Just what the world needs. A more inefficient way to power things...! :-((
Are these guys living on the same planet as the rest of us?
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
The ICNIRP guidelines for EM exposure (see http://www.icnirp.de/documents/emfgdl.pdf) give the following reference levels for general public exposure to time-varying electric and magnetic fields:
Frequency range: 10-400 MHz
E-field strength = 28 V/m^2
H-field strength = 0.073 A/m^2
Equivalent plane wave power density Seq = 2 W/m^2
Thus, how large must a sphere be if we spread 100 W over it, and still want to comply with the guidelines?
Ans: R = 2m
Of course, we are in the nearfield, and have to do a full CEM simulation or measurement, but this quick result gives a hint on what kind of levels we are talking about. You can read the full ICNIRP paper, but I quote some of the interesting parts here:
The article mentions that the waste energy is reabsorbed by the transmitting coil. So while 40% of the energy makes it to the receiver coil, the other 60% isn't just spent heating up the room. It can still be used.
I have been doing this since I was a kid, with a linear and a florescent bulb...
There is nothing to see here...
Does anyone remember a man named Tesla?
- problem was no wires no meter - no meter erader
I hope it's burnt out! The article says that "As far as we know the body has almost zero response to magnetic fields in terms of the amount of power it absorbs." which is probably true for them, but it isn't true within the scientific community. In fact a good friend of mine did his Master's thesis addressing the effects of 60 Hz magnetic fields on mice, and found very strong effects. After getting his Ph.D. he worked at a government lab doing research into this same area, and when they again found dangerous effects from 60 Hz. fields . . . guess what, the lab was shut down. My friend can't get a job anywhere in the US in this area of research, and hasn't been able to for about 15 years now.
It might be disruptive if we all started to wonder about those fields, you know. And besides, as geeks we are generally used to getting fluxed instead of getting fu***d. It's deeply entrenched in the culture.
Have a good fluxing day, ya'll.
BillyDoc
and have the cars charge themselves along it as needed. Maybe just california. would be a huge improvement to air quality. run it with cheap, clean, nuclear power. and then I woke up.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
From their paper http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0611/0611063.p df one can find this little detail: To transfer a couple of watts the device generates an rf magnetic field of the order of 100 microteslas. This is way over the INCPR recommendations for rf field exposures.
In a MRI system the rf fields are of the order of 30 microteslas. These are considered to be worth caution. An rf field of 100 uT at 10 MHz will be really bad trouble for any electronic devices and it can also cause serious heating of biological tissues. This was the rf field for just a couple of watts...
Honey!!#? Quit running the microwave! Your causing interference with my internet connection.
Glad to see MIT finally has discovered how to do what Tesla did ..oh about..hrm 107 YEARS AGO...
Gratz guys..really!
The difference between wasting 98% of your power and 99% of your power approaches zero.
[Ego]out
Good idea...excellent film, and not just for the Tesla connection.
rj
A lightbuld requires 40 watts, say. It wastes 98% of that, just agreeing with you for the sake of argument. Now you waste 60% of the power you deliver but you STILL need 40 watts at the lightbulb, which means you have to start with 100 watts. The efficiency of the process may have dropped only a little more than 1%, but the power required has more than doubled.
/., but I'll restrain myself for the sake of politeness.
I am now tempted to comment on your intelligence, this being
They've left out the most important thing - how easy will it be to steal Ned Flanders' broadcast energy?
Well, I guess their work has advanced, so maybe not a repost exactly. But there was a slashdot covering the same group back in November:
/ 15/134225
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6129460.stm
Not only that, the MIT guys made no mention of the soundtrack for the original experiment, either.
(Not AH's best, but it's got it's moments...)
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
I would totally give you credit for your politeness, if only I could.
It's nice, though, that you set up your math to look at how many watts a forty watt bulb would take to be powered, effectively cutting out the inefficiency of the forty watt bulb. If the forty watt bulb is 98% inefficient, and your power transmission is 60% inefficient, then you're (roughly) .98*.6 ~= .99 inefficient over the whole process... of making light.
Now, I recognize that to make the same amount of light you need twice as much power, but the point is that the choke in the equation is still the bulb. When you're already spending 50x the energy, 2x is a relatively small factor.
[Ego]out
We are Slashdot. We are many.
You might be right if the purported reason that some authorities encourage illegal immigration -- the need for cheap labor -- were truthful. In fact, these same authorities would still be encouraging illegal immigration even if there were a large surplus of human labor.
For an inkling of the real reason, look at who was upset by the fact that holders of "Z visas" (under the recently proposed legislation) would not be able to vote.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Just check this page for practical details on wireless power transfer.
Tesla 1904-1919.
http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1919-05-00.htm
...and all pictures on all the CRT devices in close proximity to this thing turn purple
yes, this'll work!
1. Obtain large Tesla coil
2. Turn every movie into a blue movie!
3. Profit!
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
Apparently if the transmitter/receiver are smaller than the wavelength used to transmit the energy, and they are located within ~1/4 wave of each other these efficient inductive energy transfers are possible. They are using the 'near-field' effects of EM radiation, not the more commonly used far-field. See: "Energy sucking antennas": http://amasci.com/tesla/tesceive.html " The "energy grabbing" effect is very limited. It's a nearfield effect. It could only operate within about a 1/6- or 1/4-wavelength radius around a coil or capacitor antenna, or in the region between the peaks of a propagating EM wave. In other words, when we add a tuned circuit, we can increase the "effective size" of a tiny antenna until it resembles a half-wave dipole antenna. It usually would be easier to simply build a half-wave dipole in the first place. Normally we would do so. "
"They're using a different technique to avoid needing line of sight"
No, they are not. Radio antennae transmit more than just line of sight; the wavelength determines the directionality. Radio transmitters have been transmitting power over hundreds of miles for a century.
"or be harmful to humans (the article even mentions the microwave beaming, and how you can also use it to cook a chicken - not really something you'd want in the home powering up those speakers, is it?)"
Magnetic induction is not necessarily any safer to human health than microwaves are. It could even be more dangerous; the medical community does not have enough information, yet. But, the CDC does have a FAQ sheet on it:
"Many studies report small increases in the rate of leukemia or brain cancer in groups of people living or working in high magnetic fields. Other studies have found no such increases. The most important data come from six recent studies of workers wearing EMF monitors to measure magnetic fields. All but one study found significantly higher cancer rates for men with average workday exposures above 4 milligauss. However, the results of these studies disagree in important ways such as the type of cancer associated with EMF exposures. So scientists cannot be sure whether the increased risks are caused by EMFs or by other factors. A few preliminary studies have also associated workplace EMFs with breast cancer, and one study has reported a possible link between occupational EMF exposure and Alzheimer s disease.
The data from all of these studies are too limited for scientists to draw conclusions. However, a national research effort is under way, and more study results are expected in a few years."
CDC: EMFs In The Workplace
"'How cute they lit a light bulb.' Right. Its exactly the same because the end result is the same."
The end result is not the same. Several decades ago, engineers were able to beam 500 times more energy a distance 750 times greater and with twice the efficiency as this experiment at MIT.
"That could go for pretty much any story here, right?"
No.
"Faster processor? 'Bah, we were crunching numbers in the 50s. Whats the big deal here?'"
Yeah, we were crunching numbers a *billion times slower* in the 50s. The advance in processor technology is obvious. You and everyone else have failed to show any advance in this design in terms of power transmission. It is wonderful that they were able to make magnetic inductance work so well across such a distance, but that merely makes this a lab curiosity, of no more than academic interest.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I'm sure some of you have done the microwave + light bulb trick. I remember trying it back in the 80's... Take an incandescent light bulb and place it upright in just enough water that the metal is covered (prevents "microwave lightning") and stick it in your microwave for about 20 seconds. It will light right up after a few seconds. Of course this isn't what MIT is doing but it's still fun to intrigue your friends. Here is a YouTube Video (without the water...) Notice they leave it in there for a while (>30 seconds) which causes it to explode!
Tesla did this from miles away almost a century ago!
I believe that it is news that someone has, in fact, (re)discovered the process that needs to be improved.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Let me get this straight:
You would outsource farm labor to a foreign company operating robots in our country from a control center in their country?
That, if implemented, would put the fate of our produce market in hands that might someday want to work against our interests, either because they have a produce market of their own or because our diplomatic relations with their country have gone downhill.
Trust me, this could happen with any color of worker or manager at the robotic control center--red, yellow, black, white, brown, tan, green with purple polka dots...
At least illegal immigrants have an incentive not to deliberately destroy our economy: they depend on our infrastructure.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Nikola Tesla.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Looks like the paranoid catastrophic failure for this would be to have your fillings or stitches fly out. I'm basing that on nothing other than the fact it involves magnets.
this would be his post if he did s/A/B on it:
:)
So "s/B/B" is just a cute way of saying, "I think that by B you meant B"?
get it? if you want to replace all A's with B's, do it to *ALL* of them