k wrote:

Decius wrote:

The latest technical advance out of MIT could dramatically change the drudgery of recharging portable devices: An MIT research team has figured out how to wirelessly illuminate an unplugged light bulb from seven feet away.

This must be something other than microwave induction, right? My recollection from school was that this sort of thing has been understood for a long time and the cheif problem is that if you walk into the beam it will burn you. Is this safe?!

I think I heard something about this before... I reckon it's just a fancier version of normal induction via electric field. It's cool that they've managed to tune the fields in such a way that it can work at a distance, normally the induction coil and the induced coil need to be close for there to be any efficiency at all.

The E-fields are probably safe, though you recall wondering about people that lived under power lines ;) I imagine it's fine.

[UPDATE: I was completely wrong, it's not at all inductive coupling... i'm interested in reading more... seems like a very cool tech. -k]

I smell something rank... did someone walk through the pasture on the way in?

Ok I finally got a copy of the PDF (9.8Kbit/s, whee!) and got a look at this. Prior Art: 1901 Parlor Tricks, Marconi and Tesla. There is nothing new about this at all. It's not inductive coupling, it's RF. Perhaps a little close, so it may be a not quite formed electromagnetic wave, but it's still pretty damn close in my book.

RE: Need feedback from nerds...