MIT researcher says notebooks can be recharged wirelessly

San Francisco (CA) - We have cut the phone cord, we have eliminated the need for a cable when connecting notebooks to the Internet and we use wireless headsets. But while audio and data transmissions through the air have become normal in recent years, we still need to carry around cables to recharge our portable devices. New research now indicates that even power may go wireless soon.

Forgetting to recharge that cellphone at night or forgetting the power cable for your notebook or iPod on a business trip are annoyances we have learned to live with. But it appears that researchers from the Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way to recharge mobile devices wirelessly.

"It certainly was not clear or obvious to us in the beginning how well it could actually work, given the constraints of available materials, extraneous environmental objects, and so on. It was even less clear to us which designs would work best," Soljacic said in a prepared statement.

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