Slashdot Mirror
Pushing 800W of Wireless Power at 5 Meters
Joe Decker writes "The Nevada Lightning Laboratory has experimented with Nicola Tesla's methods of wireless power transmission to push 800 Watts over 5 meters, besting MITs mark of 60W over 2 meters last year. (May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)"
800 Watts over 5 meters, ...
(May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)
I think I'll pass on that. Don't really want that sort of power aimed directly at the boys.
I've seen more watts over more distance all my life.
http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/lightning/ltg_damage.html
You just don't want to stand between the source and the destination...
The link: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla"
The summary Nicola Tesla's
Who is right? The world may never know...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords
Depends - do you want kids in future?
This is making my hair stand on end just thinking about this achievement.
Or I am a little too close.
So what happens if you have cavity fillings or a metal plate in your body?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
What about wireless Tasers?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This unit collects energy from the ambient electric fields using an on-board 'reverse Tesla Coil,' which in turn charges a large, on-board capacitor bank. The capacitors then drive a DC motor connected to one of the wheels, providing motive effort for the machine.
I wonder how much ambient electricity can be captured in a large city as an alternate means of powering an electric car?
The words "Lightning" and "laptop" in the same article... I think I will pass. Who cares if it's high voltage, high frequency. ITS LIGHTNING! Plus 800W is a bit overkill for a laptop eh?
The game.
How long does it take to heat up a burritto?
Isn't this the basic idea behind a microwave oven?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I don't know how I'd feel about EMW's strong enough to power laptops, lightbulbs, etc passing through me constantly. I'd feel as if I was in a microwave oven...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
800 Watts per 5 meter = 160 Joules/second*meter ! J/s*m ! how fun
Yes. Yes we do - Or at least we could with some sensible investments. Our (the US) power transmission infrastructure needs an overhaul - I'd rather spend tax $$ on that than several of the things they're going toward now. But, if we adopted sensible energy policies, there's no good reason that we can't have electricity to just throw away.
I'll agree that throwing $$ away in one place is no justification for throwing it away in another, but a better power (and data?) transmission system nationwide with upgraded power production (nuclear, wind, cleaner coal, etc) IMO is not remotely a waste.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Yes, you can. But I have it already. It's called a battery.
Aren't there many stories of farmers who would set up antennas to steal power by induction from high voltage lines that run across their fields?
Eschew Obfuscation
Even a 100 years or so later, the man's idea are still way ahead of the curve! Nonwithstanding of the whole "cracking the earth in half with a bomb" and "portable earthquake machine" claims, of course. Then again, maybe in another 100...
A square meter of earth's surface (at least in the tropics) probably gets more than 800W of power wirelessly, at least during summer daytime, entirely free of cost. The problems have been in building efficient and cheap receivers.
60hz vs 2.4ghz... I would think it's safe to say even the sidebands are nowhere near each other.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
and they weren't able to get enough power to make it really worthwhile. They concluded that it was possible but that you'd need a really large rig to get worthwhile amounts of power and that such a rig would be easily detectable.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The point wasn't that investment in infrastructure is a waste.
Wireless power transmission is wasteful. Between the inverse square law and eddy currents induced in everything remotely conductive between point A and point B, wireless power would lose a huge percentage of the useful energy generated.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Wrong way. The power should decrease with the inverse of the square. 2/5 = 0.4, 0.4^2 = 0.16.
So 60*0.16 = 9.6W at 5m.
That's an increase of nearly a hundredfold.
Though I am not an electrical engineer / physicist and I don't know if the inverse square law is necessarily applicable.
A: Never will happen on a large scale. Too easy to "Steal" power when transmitted openly. I dare you to try and tap a power line without permission and see what happens (Provided you don't end up bacon). Hell you can go to jail for using an open wireless access point without permission, imagine you LED lights at Christmas accidentally tapping some transmitted power. Remember the whole static electricity debate? Remember one of the biggest arguments was how to bill for it?
B: Over-the-air transmission of damn near anything tends to fall into the FCC's court. Yeah like we really want them running a power grid. Their too busy trying to start a revenue stream via fines.
C: Until they can 'protect' that energy from being used by unauthorized sources it will never get any investment capital to get it up and running on a large scale. All that it would take is some miscreant to walk into the transmission field, drop a grounder of some sort and kill the power. Just wait till a kid with two forks and ADHD somehow creates a 10k degree plasma arc and burns himself. Hell I've seen office building getting sued for static discharge injuries now. The building next to me sprays the carpet every night as a result of 'an injury'.
D: The next duck that flys in the wrong direction will no longer be blamed on TVs, Radio, Microwaves, Cell Phones, Pornograph, HARP, or day time programming but rather power transmissions screwing up mother nature's compass. Environmentalists will find some wayward owl to block this. Perhaps a misguided 3 toed sloth navigating across an ocean due to power transmission. Hell how often do we hear about crap happening to people who live under power lines. This strikes me as a dead end.
I wish all these egg-heads would focus on practical, immediate, and needed science. Yes! we can confirm there is a black hole in the center of the galaxy! Yes! we found the Higgs Boson. Great! can you feed the homeless guy tonight with that info? No? Grow food in a desert? Ahh. Ohh CO2 on a planet a long ways away, do anything with all the grant money that can help us here on Earth? Though so. I'd rather spend a billion dollars getting to Mars. At the very least if there's no life there we could mine the hell out of it and store our nuke waste in a very deep hole there... Perhaps put a nice UMAX prison there for lifers. No chance of escape when you think about it...
I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but right now we have some serious fucking issues to tackle here on Earth now in the 21st century. 70+ year old power transmission ideaology that is easily killed in the court of commerce seems like a waste right now. I'd rather see brilliant minds doing brilliant things to help people here and now that can't be stymed by 4 simple examples above.
Billions to find a sub-atomic particle and only millions to feed people. Can we swap that M and B please? Even geeks need to eat.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
We finally have a method of male contraception that doesn't involve surgery, abstinence, or a woman's permission! I'll take that laptop, son. I'm too old for more kids!
Free Martian Whores!
The Tesla is a unit of magnetic flux already, 1 Tesla (T) is equivalent to 10,000 Gauss (G)
Input power: 3.6kW
Output power: 775W
Efficiency: 21.5%
Well... It's not that good. And just for 5 meters you lose more than 4 times the amount of power you transfer.
If you want to conserve power, wireless is not the way to go - it is always going to be inherently lossy, because (a) air will never be an ideal medium (not that current wiring is, but we're getting better and better with low-resistance conductor material) and (b) if you have to distribute it from an antenna, you necessarily waste a vast amount of your energy that will not be picked up by the receiving antenna.
The only way to get around (b) is to have a perfectly tuned, ideal directional antenna and a perfectly tuned, ideal receiving antenna pointed exactly at each other for the entire time you are functioning. Any deviation from these will result in power loss.
You have your choice: energy efficiency OR omnidirectional transmission. The two are mutually exclusive. Plus, I along with many, many others would not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, so some aspects of this are pretty nifty... However, some basic math tells us that the efficiency (ratio of power consumed to "send" versus power "received" at destination) is hovering around 5:1 (20-22%) right now. Not exactly the world's greenest technology. I, for one, wouldn't want to wirelessly charge my battery-powered car using this method as I'd be paying for the wattage to power the transmitter, and losing a large chunk of it in the process. Not to mention the increase in greenhouse gas emissions due to higher generating capacity required to compensate for such losses should a system like this ever see wide-spread use. Unless efficiency climbs over, say 90-95%, people just won't want to pay the electric bill just to have the convenience of being able shed the power cord, nor will they want the pollution. The costs are just altogether too high.
-- "Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous?" -- Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes)
It matters not one whit whether they can push X watts Y meters. What matters is the the efficiency plug to socket. Anything over 25% is unlikely. Anything under 80% is wasteful.
And it's important to not cook anybody's eyeballs into 3-minute hard-boiled eggs in the process.
Experience with radar waves shows that any flux over 5 milliwatts per square centimeter is going to cause cataracts. Not good.
It is called your battery.
I would prefer a wireless vacuum cleaner. Maybe some of you don't participate in the art form known as vacuuming, but the power cord is a pain in the ass.
It's not so much aimed, in this case. If you want some serious directional juice, I have here somewhere plans for a microwave cannon using a cast-off transducer from a microwave oven. The original designer was waging a war against boom box cars and other sonic terrorists, and he built one of these things to fry equipment in passing cars and stereos on the other side of apartment walls. Even with the best focusing he could manage, though, there was enough scatter that he was forced to wear "Faraday cages" around his face and balls; he wore a hockey mask with some sort of mesh over his face and actually stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but ...
But it was an accidental discovery:
And people thought electric blankets (and living near power lines) was bad...
(OK, so maybe the link with cancer is due to the sharpshooter fallacy, but still...)
Plus, I along with many, many others would not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device.
Wait... did you just invoke Rule # 34?
I can't see how this is a practical or even a safe idea, really. I've been working in electronics my whole life, and around enough RF to know that high-power RF transmissions on almost any frequency pose health risks, as well as knowing that high-power RF transmitters aren't anywhere near the most power-efficient devices we've ever made, especially as the frequency of operation goes higher.
The only way to get around (b) is to
But that is exactly the wrong way to think about things! If you only think about why it won't work, you'll never make anything new!
For example, you could say here: in order to get high efficiencies you would have to sit in a waveguide with nearly perfect reflectors on both ends. That could lead to buildings designed as such waveguides, etc. With new materials being developed with negative indexes of refraction at useful wavelengths, impossible waveguides are just more expensive.
not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device
Similarly, the obvious solution is to remove your reproductive organs at the door! Schnick!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Another problem that any physics professor will tell you (after pointing out that "the boys" are not going to be in any more danger from that than they are from your cell phone, since neither would be likely to operate at a frequency at which the human body is resonant) is that any bit of metal can act as an antenna. All it takes is to have one piece of wire inside your laptop that happens to be the right resonant frequency for the power that is being transmitted and ZAP! I for one would not want my sensitive electronics that can be fried by static electricity in the wrong place to be anywhere near something like that.
Wireless power is only suitable for everything that is portable. Portable electronics require chargeable batteries. Chargeable batteries are also a wasteful.
Chargeable batteries also generate heat, are harmful to the environment when disposed and can cause fires and serious injury to the point of death when they explode.
There is no point not to use wireless power.
Here be signatures
Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.
You have your choice: energy efficiency OR omnidirectional transmission. The two are mutually exclusive.
They aren't mutually exclusive. You could have omnidirectional transmission and build a Dyson sphere around it, thereby not letting any energy go to waste.
(FYI: This is rather tongue-in-cheek. I am aware this would defeat the purpose of having it wireless at all.)
Though I am not an electrical engineer / physicist and I don't know if the inverse square law is necessarily applicable.
IANAn electrical engineer nor physicist, either. But I think given that the power source and target are theoretically coupled, the power is being directed rather than broadcasted. The inverse square law applies to power being broadcasted.
The relationship of power varying at 1/r^2 is from Ponynting's theorem in electromagnetics. An electromagnetic wave has an electric field (E) and magnetic field (H [1]) component and are orthogonal to one another as well as to the direction of travel. E x H (x is the vector cross product) and will give the direction of travel and has unite Watts/meter^2, which is a power density. This is ignoring the theoretical aspects of near field and far field relationships (you will most certainly be in the near field at 5 meters at 60Hz).
Back to the OP's math, he did use the wrong ratio and you used the correct one. The power will decrease as you move further away because the power density will drop as 1/r^2.
[1] If you look at wikipedia's definition of Poynting's theorem, they show B instead of H. The relationship between B and H is simply B= mu*H in freespace.
If you want to be technical, everything is going to die eventually. Even if Humans never evolved on this planet, it would still be a dying world.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
You did your math backwards! Power DECREASES with distance! If you were right, we could get more power by moving away, that doesn't make any sense. It should be about 1 and a half watts at 5 meters, not 375!
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
I'm amazed that no one has pointed out that FM radios are 100,000 watt transmitters and we live next to those all the time.
As well as standing outside. Sometimes that summer daytime gets hot, and the winter daytime gets cold. As such wireless delivery of power while actually in something protecting us from the elements is still a worthwhile goal to pursue ;).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
What did my knockoff power mac and scanner ever do to you?!
The key to this story is the name of the lab... Its the friggin LIGHTNING laboratory! So no, this will not ever really be useful. This is just a directed static discharge.
Couldn't they just set up multiple power poles, with scanning/surveillance systems, that track every wireless device within range, and hit it with a maser/laser that, upon heating/ionizing the air, create a channel that would allow a better current flow between pole and device?
I drank what? -- Socrates
...stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
Err, never mind.
Wanna pump 800W through the air? Pry the door off your microwave.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
he wore a hockey mask with some sort of mesh over his face and actually stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
Seems to me this fellow was just looking for an excuse to stick his scrotum in a tomato paste can. Did he chant master cylinder while doing so?
The original designer was waging a war against boom box cars and other sonic terrorists
So bathing everybody else with RF was an acceptable countermeasure? Who was the terrorist here?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Rumor has it that military RF technicians used to irradiate themselves with the maximum PEL(permissible exposure level) of RF radiation to sterilize themselves for the weekend.
It's a well-known fact that eyeballs and testicles are first parts of the human body to fry under high-power RF exposure.
Wow! Extracts electricity from the atmosphere, eh? Don't tell me it was invented by John Galt.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't think that anyone is saying that wireless power isn't wasteful - It's inherently lossy. The issue at hand is whether the power loss using wireless sufficiently offsets the waste associated with other transmission methods (batteries in landfills) or compensates through added convenience for the user.
I mentioned an infrastructure upgrade because we could greatly increase our available piped power while generating considerably less waste than our currently available portable power alternatives.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Tesla's original idea was to use the Earth's resonant frequencies to wirelessly transmit power from space based transmitters (e.g. PV cells) to terrestrial electrical devices.
Inexpensive wireless power would be available for everyone -- with the initial development, implementation, and maintenance costs possibly covered by some form of world tax.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Look at the transfer efficiency: they're using a 3.6 kW transmitter to power a mere 775 watt load.
At distances beyond ten meters, even steam engines have better efficiency. When you consider the best efficiency they had was 38%, and most power plants are about 33% efficient, they need a considerable improvement for this to be practical. By way of comparison, the typical cable delivery system is about 90% efficient and doesn't have the somewhat undesirable property of setting nearby electronics on fire.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
But it would allow lazy US bums to not get out of the coach to change the plug!
"As seen on TV!"
Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.
So you have a wireless power transmitter in the bathroom integrated in the normal electrical outlet. What powered bathroom devices could we power this way? Tooth brushes, razors, vanity mirrors, shower radios, all sorts of kids toys, and that adult bath toy the battery powered vibrator.
Cell phones, cordless phones, and remotes might also be good to charge via this method as well.
Heck, making AA, AAA, C, and D sized "batteries" that just receives "wireless power" from the "wireless transmitter" would let you power some of those kids toys for as long as you have the wireless transmitter plugged in. That would be much better than running down the batteries really quickly and then either having to recharge or get new ones.
I had a Braun electrical toothbrush 10 years ago that used induction to recharge its battery =)
Wireless power transmission is wasteful.
I disagree. We have found ways to transmit power efficiently, for example, parabolic antennas and phase arrays. We could even design the systems (assuming they have enough antenna placed in the space and the wavelength is small enough) so that the transmissions mostly avoid certain places (eg, you, the interior of your TV set, etc). Having said that, I don't see a compelling reason to have substantial power provided via wireless in a personal space. If the system is hacked, it can cause considerable property damage and bodily harm.
I have been following "new" energy for years. Every "new" energy story is a mystery novel with the last half removed.
1. Big announcement.
2. Impressive Demo.
4. Denunciation by "mainstream science" (Second Law of Thermodynamics, etc explained again)
5. ????
6. Never hear anything else about it ever again good or bad.
It's called a battery.
Mine works well. Seldom, if EVER, do I want to sit somewhere without power and use a computer.
If I'm camping, the computer is a rarity, only to check in via cell modem with family.
Otherwise, I have time to power the laptop enough for 100 percent charge, and another 2.5 hours.
--Toll_Free
A future without batteries - no need to charge phones or MP3 players, or even electric cars. No lost phone chargers, no running out of power sockets. Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
You have your choice: energy efficiency OR omnidirectional transmission. The two are mutually exclusive. Plus, I along with many, many others would not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device.
How about you not liking this tech, but your neighbor's kid's remote controlled car or plane uses it so you get the effects without the benefits. Or maybe your gadget hungry neighbors bought a new robot lawn mower, and it is powered via this method as well as their yard or Christmas lights.
Of course being the true scientist, you'd wait until neighbor's kid has some offspring and see if they are deformed or not before really trusting the tech yourself.
Wireless power is only suitable for everything that is portable. ...
There is no point not to use wireless power.
Setting aside concerns about increasing environmental EMF, what would wireless power offer other than convenience?
Wireless power transmission is more wasteful than conventional methods of power delivery.
Your points about batteries and their ill effects are right on, which is why fuel cell technology is getting a lot of focus in the R&D world.
On another note, why would we create infrastructure that could interfere with neural interfaces? Even if we are only talking about the helmet style esp game controllers that are coming to market, why would we saturate our environment with electricity when the next gen of interfaces rely on reading minute electrical impulses?
The inverse square law works in the near field of any power being transmitted.
Broadcasted and transmitted, in the realm of AC circuit analysis is the same thing.
I'm not an Engineer, either, but I do build some QUITE large transmitter / amplifiers. Think in the tens of thousands of watts.
--Toll_Free
The background EM field is very, very small, and much smaller than a few mW. Just because the transmitter does 50kW doesn't mean you're getting any substantial percentage of it.
The proposal in the OP for power transmission is incredibly dangerous for real-world use.
Oh crap the cat was laying on the power transmitter...
And, the kid's toys will stop when you unplug the transmitter.
Some of these batteries should be labeled as "flashlight/camera use only."
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Wouldn't be a safe bet.
At the tens of thousands of watt level, any non-linear junction in the near field would cause rectification of the 60 hertz signal and cause MASSIVE amounts of harmonic radiation.
I've actually found harmonics in one of my transmitters caused by an aluminum shed (storage shed from K-Mart) next door to my friends house. Shed came down, so did the amount of interferience complaints.
Diodes can be used as noise generators, covering up to HUNDREDS of megaherts.
2.4 gig isn't the only band used, and this has potential to cause ALL sorts of problems.
Not to mention, the idea is pretty much useless.
--Toll_Free
You can also use the "near field" by building an antenna that cancels in all directions. There are fields near it, from which you can grab power. But the waves don't propagate away from it.
It's similar to the region just outside the surface of a prism that has a light beam doing total internal reflection. The fields extend beyond the surface of the prism but can't propagate away. But put another prism close enough (essentially touching in the case of visible light) and they'll couple across so the light beams away inside it. Use a wavelength on the order of the distance you want to send the power or longer and you can do the same thing.
Not too useful for long-distance transmission, of course.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wireless power transmission is wasteful.
So are linear power supplies, but there are still plenty of applications for them.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Indeed, the main power source of all life is nuclear (fusion) powered, produces lots of radioactive radiation, is hopelessly inefficient (only a small part of the energy it produces reaches even the earth), and is already known to eventually fail catastrophically, destroying the whole earth during failure.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not completely true.
Using collinear style antenna elements, you can take the RF being directed toward the sky, and have it steered (electronically using phasing harnesses or other means of propogational delay) towards the horizon, which is typically where most of the RF needs to go.
I have a double collinear 2 meter stack, and it works wonders. I can listen to a sattelite as it comes up from the horizon at great levels, to about a 45 degree incline from my antenna, where it virtually vanishes. Then, when it's at the 45 degree horizon again (after it apexes my location), it comes back at great levels.
My ground plane (1/4 wave) doesn't do NEARLY as well as the collinear, the GP antenna will actually hear the sattelite the entire pass. However, the signal from the GP antenna NEVER approaches the level from the collinear.
--Toll_Free
Lots of specific applications are wasteful EXCEPT in their specific application case. I don't think wireless transmission of electricity will replace the current transmission infrastructure anytime soon, but I can certainly see that the usefulness in certain applications will over-ride the waste (cost).
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
A lot of toothbrushes now use inductive charging. My electric tea kettle does as well, and it is high gain. This means the contact is well sealed. The juice moves over the insulator. No unsealed points.
Still, it would be cool to have a sort of recharging zone -- a table, say, by the front door where you could just toss all your mobile stuff to get a wireless boost. It might even stat broadcasting only when a device is there. (Unlike a transformer, which sucks a little juice like a little vampire all day long waiting for someone to plug him -- or her -- in.)
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
The first part(sterilizing on purpose) may or may not be true, but the second part is true for both ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. See this or google for other examples.
Umm... not really. Wireless != portable. Wireless can make something more mobile than if it was wired, but that depends entirely on the range of the wireless. Five meters is nowhere near enough to make it any kind of replacement for batteries. And I'd say we're a long long way from having wireless power with any kind of range sufficient to replace batteries. It may not even be possible, period. Batteries are going to be around for a while.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
The atmosphere has a considerable potential gradient across it. If you put up a raised, insulated, conductor, it will become charged to the average potential at the elevations it runs through. When it runs for tens of miles it will also have enough capacitance to store a considerable charge, able to draw a considerable arc to a ground.
Unfortunately the available current is so low that it doesn't pay to string one to collect power. And it is subject to wild variations in the amount of power it provides depending on weather. (Extremely wild, when you consider that it's a lightning rod miles long... B-) )
Some people have experimented with down-converting it using a buck converter built with a "doorknob" capacitor for the input filter and relaxation oscillator's capacitive component, a spark plug for the switch (also a voltage regulator and the oscilator's negative-resistance element), an automotive spark coil for a step-down transformer, and an ordinary power supply diode for the rectifier. They claim to pull enough power to gradually charge small batteries from collection wires they string up on their property.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wireless power transmission is wasteful.
Level the Nevada desert and cover it with solar cells.
The MIT group is not proposing to use omnidirectional (or directional) radiative energy transfer, which indeed would radiate most of the energy into the environment, and only a small fraction into the receiver, and even that could be eliminated if something (e.g. a person) walks between the source and receiver.
They are proposing non-radiative resonant energy transfer, in which both the source and receiver are resonant oscillators at a particular frequency coupled via the near field (non radiatively), and hence preferentially transfer energy compared to anything else that is not resonant (with a long lifetime) at the same frequency. Furthermore, they are using resonators that only couple through their magnetic fields (the electric fields are largely within capacitors inside the device), which further reduces absorption of energy by the environment (because most materials are non-magnetic, energy dissipation is largely via ohmic heating, i.e. by the electric fields). Because of this, almost all of the losses take the form of resistive heating in the devices themselves; only a miniscule fraction is dissipated in the surrounding environment (e.g. a person).
Of course, this being Slashdot, it's not surprising that most posters never RTFAed and post nonsense "it's just like an inductive transformer" (nope, those don't use resonance) or "it's just like an antenna" (nope, that is radiative transfer) or "Tesla looked at this a century ago" (nope, people like Tesla were concerned with power transfer over long distances, which necessitates radiative mechanisms and hence low efficiency).
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
World hunger is actually caused by politics. America's Midwest produces (or is capable of producing) enough food to feed the entire world.
Not any more.
Politics and economics have led to a situation where the US is now a net IMPORTER of food.
(Thank the nice politicians for the inheritance tax: Family farms are a thing of the past, now that every new generation (and the last couple old ones) have to sell off enough land to give about half the value of it - as land for urban development - to Uncle Sam when mom and pop pass away.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
your coal fired laptop is ready.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
As opposed to non-radioactive radiation?
No point NOT to use it in the right CONTEXT. Wireless devices - yes, factories? I don't think so...
Don't hold your phone up to your ear.
Imagine the applications of this if we had a sizable fleet of electric cars in use.
Place chargers near congested intersections in big cities. Cars would be getting charged while waiting at red lights.
Parking garages for large office buildings would charge all of the cars parked in them for the day.
Others?
Of course there is always a solution...
Suppose my problem is to find another problem for which there is no solution. Does my problem have a solution, or not? And either way, how does that affect your claim? ;-)
When I was in the Canadian Military we had a sat dish we could hook up to our PABX in the field, and it stated in the manual that you should not stand in front of the thing when it was operational or the transmitted signal from it "might cause sterility" or something to that effect. It had a hazard sticker on it that should have warned people to stay clear. Try as we might we couldn't get people to stop walking in front of it (even if we put up a tape barrier, people would just step over it rather than walking the 8 feet or so required to go around it).
In the end I had to sketch up a sign of someone with their balls being blown off their body and large letters warning "RADIATION HAZARD - SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR CHANCE TO EVER HAVE KIDS" and post it over top of the dish where it was clearly visible. That and the tape finally got people to stay out of the hazardous area.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Cell phones, cordless phones, and remotes might also be good to charge via this method as well.
Heck, making AA, AAA, C, and D sized "batteries" that just receives "wireless power" from the "wireless transmitter" would let you power some of those kids toys for as long as you have the wireless transmitter plugged in. That would be much better than running down the batteries really quickly and then either having to recharge or get new ones.
You don't need 800W to charge a couple of small batteries. The "problem" that you describe is already solved with inductive power. Most electric tooth brushes with batteries work on this principle.
A 5-meter range isn't really a serious limitation. Just put one transmitter in every room in your house (spaced appropriately to avoid overlaps) and you can go anywhere in your house with your portable device. That setup would be able to give power to any room smaller than ten meters in diameter, more than enough for the average home.
Sure, maybe you can't take the device out into your car - but why not put one in your car, too?
Sorry, I'm assuming it's a 5-meter radius, not a 5-meter point-to-point transmission. I'm not sure whether the tech described in the article is omnidirectional or point-to-point.
Or any part of your body. Or a pigeon. Or a kite. Or... well, you get the idea.
I can just see it now, suddenly the tinfoil hat guys will seem sane since they're marginally protected from being grazed by one of these things!
Suppose my problem is to find another problem for which there is no solution. Does my problem have a solution, or not? And either way, how does that affect your claim? ;-)
If your problem is to find problems than the solution to that is to stop having this problem by not looking for problems anymore. This doesn't affect my claim, just your psyche. If you found a problem that doesn't have a solution then the solution to that problem would not exist. This affects my claim as follows: it makes it wrong.
Here be signatures
He was an RF Vigilante, in response to the Sonic Terrorists. Since he published his design to a select group, he was actually trying to form an RF Posse. I thought about jumping on my high horse and riding out with him, but then I recalled the gonad pain of a saddle and thought better of it. It didn't bother him because he was armored with the tomato paste can, apparently.
Couldn't give you one, anyway: it was strictly old school, on printed-and-stapled paper and shared via snail mail with a stamp. This was only a few years ago, though, not pre-Internet.
and that adult bath toy the battery powered vibrator.
Oh, pure genius! I never even *considered* taking adult toys into the bath! Sign me up for your newsletter!
Rumor has it that military RF technicians used to irradiate themselves with the maximum PEL(permissible exposure level) of RF radiation to sterilize themselves for the weekend.
Let me be the first to say: You're doing it wrong!
Jesus Christ..... if there was ever a time when that meme was appropriate......
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
"Anywhere in the house" does not replace batteries. The real purpose for batteries is so you can take your gear where there is no power. Battery-powered devices in places where there are power outlets available is generally just a minor convenience.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Good point, recharging batteries. What if they were placed at street intersections to give discrete power boosts to appropriately equipped electric cars -- wouldn't this extend the range of EV's and give people some additional surety that they won't run out of juice on the way to work? It would be a good way to provide EV charging infrastructure without cables.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.
So you have a wireless power transmitter in the bathroom integrated in the normal electrical outlet. What powered bathroom devices could we power this way? Tooth brushes, razors, vanity mirrors, shower radios, all sorts of kids toys, and that adult bath toy the battery powered vibrator.
Actually, I think you don't want this for a bathroom appliance. You want something you can physically cut the power feed to for safety's sake. Electric toothbrushes charge via induction these days and their internal batteries won't kill you.
Unless you want the one-shot bathtub toaster. That might be a good application of this technology.
Hopelessly inefficient? Measured how? I want my Sun to radiate light and heat. What is wasted? If you believe that the purpose of the Sun is just to illuminate the Earth and that everything else is wasted, you arguement may hold water. I consider that the source of power is fine, it is simply our inability to capture it that is the problem.
Can you imagine if we could effectively capture just one millionth of the total solar output of the Sun?
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
As opposed to non-radioactive radiation?
Yes, non-radioactive like the radiation of heat from the ductwork in your house on a cold day, or from the side of an older toaster. Perhaps non-radioactive like the radiation of visible light from a fluorescent or incandescent light bulb. Radiation is just transmission of energy. It is not always due to radioactive decay.
Isn't this how smart cards work already?
;)
I thought that smart cards had a tiny chip on them with no power supply, they get the energy to perform the transaction from the antenna built into the card when it's held over the point of sale device.
Which gives it just enough juice to perform the job at hand and then go back to sleep when the card it put away. So we already use it and need it to survive
Personally I welcome our new wireless power overlords......
could help take EV's mainstream.
The Nevada Lightning Lab article says, "Far fields are mostly radiative, and drop off linearly with distance." This isn't true. Once the radiator's size becomes small compared to the distance (the definition of "far field"), an electromagnetic field's intensity declines proportional to the square of distance. I bring this up because there are some very basic physical rules that affect all radiation-coupled energy systems, and it's misleading for people to make these kinds of claims, especially for a new technology likely to be marketed.
The 1/r^2 rule applies to nearly all fields -- electromagnetic, gravitational, even sound in air. People who makes these kinds of claims are either ignorant or are intent on selling you something that doesn't exist. Or both.
... to this day. I am sure research can make it more efficient over time. Maybe by sensors that are able to locate devices so that power supplies can target them, therefore being more efficient. When devices are not in range, power supplies could be automatically switched off.
You're missing the point. Wireless power transmission is wasteful because it loses a large quanitiy of its initial output by massive (logarythmic) degrees as the distance is extended. This is a law of electromagnetic physics, not a limitation of current technology.
To do what you're saying, we would need to find a new way to transmit power that doesn't involve the EM spectrum. Which is hard to imagine since every form of energy from light and color to communications and electricity revolves around this model.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
This must be why so much of the artwork we see depicting the future shows people wearing spandex, nylon, rubber, leather, or vinyl. You have to wear non-conductive clothing to prevent sparking!
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
Of course, this being Slashdot, it's not surprising that most posters never RTFAed and post nonsense "it's just like an inductive transformer" (nope, those don't use resonance) or "it's just like an antenna" (nope, that is radiative transfer) or "Tesla looked at this a century ago" (nope, people like Tesla were concerned with power transfer over long distances, which necessitates radiative mechanisms and hence low efficiency).
It's a pity that your handwave of the "Tesla looked at this a century ago" opinion falls so flat by proving that you, yourself, did not RTFA, or you would have seen the third paragraph of the article, which states "Intriguing as this might be, we have no plans to pursue intellectual property for this discovery. The concept of using resonant coils to wirelessly couple power was patented by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago." Shooting your argument in the foot by demonstrating that you are a member of the population you rail against does little for your credibility.
There is a low tech solution that can span millions of kilometers, its called light. How about a LED source combined with a 41% efficient composite solar panel on the recieving end? Porbably more efficient and zero electromagnetic 'pollution' Start work on saving the planet, we don't need these gadgets
Great, Now where did I leave those sharks... ps. does anyone know how far Tesla himself got?
We tuned our VLF 15-25khz xmitter by peaking glowing disconnected fluorescent tubes.
http://www.hawkins.pair.com/nss.shtml
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
I was talking about the MIT group (who explicitly discuss the differences between what they are doing and what Tesla considered), not the group in the article here. And you're right that Tesla also looked at non-radiative schemes for very short distances, e.g. Tesla coils, but at the time of Tesla most of the interest was in long-range power delivery (which never worked out because of the problems with radiative transfer, and in any case such schemes were supplanted by the wired electrical grid).
Tesla coils involve large electric fields between the source and receiver device, and so (a) are quite different from the magnetically-coupled resonators the MIT group proposes and (b) are impractical for the short-distance power-delivery applications considered here because they can dissipate too much energy into the environment.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
If you invoke Rule #34 on vaporware, does it come into existence?
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I don't think many people spend significant time sitting right next to a TV transmission tower. WHo know,
maybe some of or cancer deaths may be related to EM spectrum energy. That would be a tough study to do with
people.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/164/6/538
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
As TFA cleary states, far fields decrease in power linearly, not by the inverse square, to the distance. Wires also lose power linearly.
But why should you bother considering the actual problem and solution? You already know everything that can be known about electric transmission.
--
make install -not war
Phased arrays of antennas can direct energy to a variable point rather than broadcast it, without the receiver needing a similarly complex antenna.
--
make install -not war
Or it could just be used for short range transmission, with wired transmission taking care of shorter ranges. It would be incredibly wasteful to wirelessly transmit electricity from a plant to everyone's home, but setting up small 5m radius bubbles within those homes might not be that much more wasteful than the hundreds of feet of wiring and cords that most American homes require anyway. And just imagine if we could do this with DC, eliminating the need for irritating (and very wasteful) adapters that just about everything requires now.
On a tangentially related note: cleaner coal, nuclear and wind are great and all, but can't we just start sticking solar panels on everything already? They've been around forever, they work great on top of space that isn't used anyway (like roofs), they cause virtually no pollution or other environmental issues once installed and the most common deployments are practically invisible. We could start by requiring new commercial construction to have solar paneling and giving tax credits (at or around %100 of the cost) for that as well as retrofitting current structures, using whatever excess power can be generated to reduce the power we need to generate with less clean methods. It's relatively cheap, easy, and uncontroversial.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
That is either one of the most informative posts I've seen on Slashdot or the most brazen piece of BS I've ever seen. Most technology topics I know enough to tell if what someone is saying makes sense. But what you are saying is so far out there I honestly can't tell if you are making this stuff up. Kudos either way.
I agree with you there. Here in the midwest, where the solar output is only so-so, for my household power consumption, I'm looking at $40,000 to convert to solar. I'd do it if it were cheaper, but since I already get wind-generated power from my local electric company (I pay a small premium for this, which I'm fine with), there's no reason to absorb the cost, as it would take approximately 44 years to recover the cost from such an upgrade (assuming I break even on power consumption vs. generation). Sure, the green power I use could then be redirected to other areas, created a larger abundance, but unless there is a sizeable government intervention, there's just no way I can justify that kind of personal contribution toward the collective good.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
Solutions are known to cause cancer in the state of California
Actually, no.
Phased arrays of antennas can "direct energy" such that the interference points of the multiple waveforms reinforce and suppress in a specific pattern, but they cannot direct the energy merely to a single "point."
And, you are still not directing "all the energy" along that single point. Far from it, you are losing plenty of energy; it is still being sent through the dead zones, even if the waveforms from the multiple antennas are having the net effect of canceling each other. The energy is expended either (a) in the transmission medium or (b) upon whatever they reach when they deconverge past the cancellation point.
The reason Tesla was forced to drop the project what because J.P. Morgan pulled funding because he realized he couldn't stick a meter on it and thus charge people for it.
But, IMHO, wireless power has a lot of potential when it comes to electric vehicles. The battery is the limiting factor so if the car doesn't need one and is able to pull power out of the ether, that would be a great reason to do it. You'd probably still want the battery as a backup for when you venture outside the range of the transmission system.
Then if you take it a step further, trucking is a big reason why electric vehicles aren't going to be a big deal. But if you can set up a transmission system on all Interstates and designated truck routes and augment the local travel with traditional diesel power. That make a lot of sense
Of course you HAVE to use nuclear power to make it work. Passive power generation ain't going to cut it.
Easy! And I bet it can reach more than 5 meters.
-><- no
But 5m wireless 'hotspots' combined with a battery would be insanely useful and convenient.
Who HONESTLY needs wireless power, that rechargable batteries can't provide?
charging a defibrillator, or anything you want inside your body, but not having enough battery power to last a lifetime (also maybe a embedded cellphone)
And places where size seriously matters, perhaps a microbot that does surgery.
I hate wires as well, but just hope it won't fried my balls. It's way too much wireless stuff around us in these days and nobody can tell for sure how it might affect on us.
Laugh. It's funny.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
... if I remember correctly, Tesla's wireless transmission of power was based on the conductive properties of the ionosphere and earth with the atmosphere acting as a dielectric - or in other words, using the earth + air + ionosphere as a giant capacitor. His theory was that you could charge the earth using this capacitance and retrieve the energy from any other point on the earth with nearly 70% efficiency.
Thanks for that. I'd never heard the explanation and that makes a lot of sense. (Might be interesting to look at it as a concentric sphere resonant cavity, too...)
That explains his building devices with large rounded (to avoid arcs) structures on top and referring to them as "elevated capacitances": He was trying for capacitive coupling to a conductor above him, as opposed to emitting/absorbing electromagnetic waves from the electric dipole field between the "capacitive hat" and ground and/or the current in the structure between them.
= = =
All of which is not germane to my previous post, which was trying to explain the "can spot weld with power collected by an unconnected transmission line" in terms of collected static electricity.
It would be interesting to look at the waveforms on such a line to see how much of the power was DC from static collection and how much / what frequencies AC.
Other potential sources would be Tesla-style capacitive coupling to any excursions in the ionosphere and acting as an antenna for any (long-wave) electromagnetic stuff in the vicinity. (Construction crane operators working within a mile or so of AM radio transmitters with a crane boom even remotely near a quarter-wavelength for the signal have been known to be knocked out when getting on/off their vehicles and completing the circuit at the base of the crane-as-antenna.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I can just see it now, suddenly the tinfoil hat guys will seem sane since they're marginally protected from being grazed by one of these things!
No, they'll be sane because they've elected to die a quicker death, than the slow, painful and likely death of those who suffer third-degree burns over their entire bodies.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Yes, you may.
Sig this!
"*** Not measured -- arcing hazard too great at close separation." In this case, "close separation" means 4m away, so don't put this in your room. Forget about RF radiation, worry about the fire hazard!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think everybody is missing the point. Actually 800W at 5 meters is enough to install it in any house. We don't seek to replace every single cable, just the ones which bother us. I can see a hybrid solution for houses, in which you can plug the devices that you "leave there" (i mean nonportable devices such as TVs) and just use the wireless for laptops, phones and such things. Also if you wire all the house and install one "wireless outlet" in every room you should get enough power for most things. I can perfectly see such solutions in the houses.
Yes, you can do this, but why bother?
If you actually read Tesla's paper, you find that what he had in mind was powering a small town with a setup where each house had an attic full of antennas to power a 40 watt bulb. The efficiency would be low, and would require excessive power at the generation end. But it would be wireless power transmission.
The basic problem is that you power not only tuned power receivers, but just about anything with a coil anywhere nearby.
Point to point power transmission via microwaves works better. There have been a few demo systems, mostly for point to point power transmissions between islands. It's been tried successfully between Hawaiian islands, on Reunion Island, and between Japanese islands. Of course, it's been discussed for solar power satellites. So far, nobody has found a commercial justification for doing it, but it works.
Wireless power, you still need to be around a live power source. Nuclear batteries are the best option, plug in and last for life. The only problem being the batteries may outlast the device by a n factor... Didn't the machines in Terminator future run on nuclear batteries or something?
By your logic, I believe everyone should drive around stretch hummers.
So what if it requires expensive infrastructure (far more road space) and is tremendously more inefficient. Everyone would be more comfortable and safer.
Clearly everyone should drive hummers as priuses also pollute and cause environmental damage in their creation.
Beyond that point, wireless power only makes sense in a few circumstances - namely when around something that is connected to the grid. You'll still need batteries, unless you expect planes, cars, parks, non-new age houses/cities, etc. to all have this wireless power.
And if you're talking about transmitting blanket wireless over entire cities...
1. It's tremendously inefficient. Physics will only allow it to be made so efficient, and that's still tremendously inefficient.
2. How will you keep track of who gets what energy? Oh yea, that's right, it's practically free, so there will be no worries.
3. Laptops and the like are getting much faster/more energy efficient. Even if this comes out tomorrow, it still won't be widely available for at least a decade. In the meantime, battery life will get better, so the impact won't be as great. Plugging in a computer at night isn't that big a deal.
4. We still haven't gotten high speed wireless yet. Wireless internet (802.11b) has been around for what, close to 9 years and we still haven't gotten anywhere close to providing 'free' or 'truly fast' internet, and coverage is still highly lacking - and wireless internet is relatively free and physics isn't against it.
If we developed cold fusion, it might be plausible. Of course when we develop such a plentiful energy source, we'll probably have developed a more efficient mobile power source, like fuel cells or http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/1821208 capacitors. Sorry to rain on your flying car. It'll be neat for certain applications, but I doubt it'll be something that important for laptops.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
I hope those things don't malfunction...wonder what 800V would do to a persons internal organs...
Even with the best focusing he could manage, though, there was enough scatter that he was forced to wear "Faraday cages"
Should have used a MASER. And there's an XKCD reference in there somewhere.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I took enough physics to know that you're thinking of volume being a length cubed quantity, but the way you should think of it is like this.
Imagine your source (gravity, light, whatever) as a small sphere. That sphere has a surface area of 4*pi*(r^2). Parenthesis for no ambiguity. So, if you double the radius (the distance) you have four times the surface area. If you triple the radius, you get nine times the surface area. The Wikipedia page has a lovely diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
If gravity worked in a different way mathematically, and instead was 'filling a volume' then yes, you would be cubing and what-not.
I don't know why I'm explaining this to an AC but it should nonetheless be informative.
And did you read the post I was replying to? The dude was talking about replacing existing electric power infrastructure with wireless. There is absolutely no way that you are going to transmit power via RF through air as efficiently as you can via low frequency AC through metallic conductors.
Yes, this is an interesting experiment that may have useful applications. No, it is not going to eliminate wires.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
First, all that energy which is radiated to outer space, never hitting earth. Now, the light which reaches other celestal bodies could be included, because it enables us to see them, and in case of the moon it even makes the night brighter (at least some of them), but even then, the vast majority of the energy doesn't reach any celestal body either, but just goes into free space. How inefficient.
Next, not all energy of the sun goes into electromagnetic radiation. Some of the energy goes into the solar wind. Again, completely useless; moreover, in cases of large sun activity it may even disturb our radio communications.
Finally, even in the case of electromagnetic radiation, there's not just light and heat. There's also X rays, which fortunately never reach the earth because the atmosphere filters them. Those X rays are, of course, also completely useless for us, thus wasted energy.
Exactly. Even capturing just one millionth would be a huge increase. And that would still mean a loss of 99.9999% of the sun's energy. As I said, totally inefficient.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Off Topic - for any of you new to moderating; do it responsibly or don't do it at all. Wasting mod points is not like wasting precious resources on inefficient means of transferring power from one source to another, nor is it like wasting time discussing such silly, excessive technology. :)
And you're right that Tesla also looked at non-radiative schemes for very short distances, e.g. Tesla coils,
Tesla also looked at non-radiative resonance-based schemes for long distances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer#Tesla_patents
Hate to break it to you, but you're bathed in much more than a few millitwatts of EM every second of every day.
My new favourite unit!
xterm -n 8
And in this year's Darwin awards, someone takes a mains powered adult toy into the bath...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Those X rays are, of course, also completely useless for us, thus wasted energy.
Sigh.
All electromagnetic radiation of higher energy than visible light is important. The mutations in genetic code that are part of evolution (and hence helped to create us) are caused (mostly) by ionizing radiation. Also, higher energies received by the earth are converted to heat. This is part of our heat gain from the Sun.
But again, I must add that if you look at the efficiency of the sun as a power source (ignoring the argument concerning the energy that strikes the earth, that is a lack of efficiency of our reception, NOT efficiency in production) that you would find that the fraction of biological useful energy (not just human useful, you speciest) is quite good, especially for a natural process that life has adapted to, rather than was created for the sole purpose of supporting life on earth.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Heck, making AA, AAA, C, and D sized "batteries" that just receives "wireless power" from the "wireless transmitter" would let you power some of those kids toys for as long as you have the wireless transmitter plugged in. That would be much better than running down the batteries really quickly and then either having to recharge or get new ones.
You must not have children. I can't wait for batteries to die sometimes, and sometimes replace good ones with dead ones. Freaking Elmo.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
Not scientists. Just some guys with a TV show and one manly, manly mustache between them.
I can't watch that show anymore because I end up screaming at the TV because they've made some CRITICAL, SIMPLE error in setting up an experiment.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac