... with localized slowly evanescent field patterns, for wireless non-radiative energy transfer.

That, my friends, in case you were wondering, is what Aristeidis Karalis, J.D.Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić have been up to of late.

What does that mean? Well, possibly less hassle for those of us burdened with too many PDAs, cell phones, mp3 players, and domestic robots that uncomplainingly do all our housecleaning and yardwork when we have stacks of 80 papers to grade. In a presentation this week at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, the MIT scientists, taking a leaf from much ballyhooed and maligned Nikola Tesla, outlined a scheme that could make plug-in rechargers a thing of the past.

Think bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius. Pastorius was a master of harmonics; he knew, tapping into that Greek understanding of celestial ratios, how to play a note on his bass and induce a sound at a higher frequency: two notes for the price of one. So too, other physical objects begin to vibrate when exposed to certain frequencies of energy. In essence, the MIT researchers have determined that through this tendency of objects to resonate, energy can be transferred wirelessly across a mid-sized room, without prohibitively high dissipation, even if "extraneous objects"--like, say, humans or walls--are in the way. Their contention?

The omnidirectional but stationary (non-lossy) nature of the near field makes this mechanism suitable for mobile wireless receivers. It could therefore have a variety of possible applications including for example, placing a source (connected to the wired electricity network) on the ceiling of a factory room, while devices (robots, vehicles, computers, or similar) are roaming freely within the room. Other possible applications include electric-engine buses, RFIDs, and perhaps even nano-robots.

Naturally, naysayers have already begun worrying about whether such fields would pose health problems to certain extraneous objects (not walls). But others (see BBC, Scientific American.com, and PhysOrg.com) suggest that this could free the absentminded among us from the annoyance of dead phones and all those other banes of our desire to be eternally connected to the communicosmos. What ever happened to strings and paper cups?