Wireless Power

No, not power for wireless devices, but actual power without wires. Believe it or not a majority of energy around us everyday is wireless. We just can't harness it and use it to power our devices that need it. Sound, light and radio waves along with all the other frequencies of the energy spectrum are all energy in some form that we use in different ways. Being able to harness it so it can be more useful to us is the key.

A company called WiTricity has developed a way to transfer energy using magnetic fields and sending it from source to destination at a certain frequency wave. Their goal was to get more power to travel longer distances. With energy waves, the shorter the frequency the shorter the distance and speed it travels, hence the reason you see the lightning before the thunder, light waves move faster and you might see it but not hear anything if it is really far off.

WiTricity's goal is to have devices without power cables, a device would plug into the outlet and transmit the energy to the TV, Laptop, cell phones (mainly for charging) that has a receiver for the wireless energy which then converts the magnetic waves back to energy it can use. They claim that it will not add much to the cost of devices. One of the biggest advantages I could see is on laptops, both my wife and I have one and while mine can run for 11 hours in low energy mode, hers lasts less than an hour so if we take it outside or somewhere else in the house we have to unhook the power cord and plug it in where ever we are going to be. This would definitely be helpful.

WiTricity claims it is safe and that the magnetic waves are very similar to the earth's magnetic field. Of course the earth's magnetic field mainly emanates from the poles and at lower latitudes it really doesn't affect us. Magnetic fields is one of the possibilities that male fertility is dropping since all powered devices give off electro-magnetic fields. So hopefully they test this before releasing it on the public.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/02/wireless.electricity/index.html