Intel teases shape-shifting programmable matter

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Not really

Sustaining an EM field only takes energy if there's something in the field to take away the energy. This is only really caused by the wiring of the transmitter and the field interacting with stray metallic (conducting) objects nearby. With proper design, efficiency and losses can be on par with your standard wall wart you leave plugged in when you're not charging your phone or PDA.

Hard drives are hard to demagnetize. There are already powerful magnets in the motors for these drives. Don't worry about it. Same goes for credit cards. I've put huge rare earth disc magnets in my pockets (pull force of ~200 lbs) and my credit cards still work fine.

Most mobile devices (PDA, phone, camera) don't even use magnetic storage. Flash memory won't be hurt by these fields.

The electric field strength of these fields is thousands of times less than the breakdown field strength of air. Assume 60W over a 25 sq. cm surface (say for a laptop with a charging unit the size of a very small cell phone). This is a power density of 24 kW/m^2. The electric field strength here would be 3 kV/m. It takes 3300 kV/m to cause an arc through air. That's a safety factor of over 1000.

If you increase the frequency of the delivered power, you're even less likely to have an effect on permanent magnetic storage (credit cards and hard drives), as these don't respond to fields of high frequency. As long as you keep the frequencies out of the communication bands of your devices, you won't notice any problems.

It sounds scary and all, but if you do the math and think about the physics, it's pretty safe.

Posted by: arkolbus   Posted on: 09/02/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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