The wonders of science: Wireless power transfer. Charge your laptop/pda/cell phone/etc without plugging it in:

A team from MIT's [sic] has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing the goal of wireless power transfer. This brings them closer to their goal: smartphones, laptops, MP3 players, and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in. This group was able to supply power to a 60W light bulb from a source seven feet away. There was no physical connection between the source and the appliance.

How, you ask, is this magic accomplished?

The MIT team refers to its concept as "WiTricity" (as in wireless electricity). WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects. Specifically, the MIT team focused on one particular type: magnetically coupled resonators. They explored a system of two electromagnetic resonators coupled mostly through their magnetic fields; they were able to identify the strongly coupled regime in this system, even when the distance between them was several times larger than the sizes of the resonant objects. This way, efficient power transfer was enabled. Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. "The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations," Andre Kurs, a graduate student in physics on the team, points out. The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with this field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.

Read the entire article here.