ITWire's Stephen Withers reports that a team of scientists at MIT "have demonstrated a wireless power transfer scheme they have dubbed 'WiTricity' or wireless electricity."

"While the demonstration was of a 60W globe being powered from a source over two metres (seven feet) away, a more popular application could be to recharge electronic gadgets such as mobile phones, making them truly wireless," Withers writes. "A key point is that WiTricity does not use electromagnetic radiation, which would be inefficient and possibly hazardous. Instead, it relies on magnetically coupled resonance which gives efficient energy transfer and interacts very weakly with most common materials including living creatures."

"The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations," says researcher Andre Kurs.

Nice promise and a thrilling idea, but if Wi-Fi is freaking people out, I can't wait to see how the world responds to this one...

More here from BBC News ... more here from Scientific American ... more here from the Guardian ... more here from the AP ... and the press release is here.