The BBC's Jonathan Fildes reports that researchers at MIT have designed a "relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires."

Although nothing's been built or tested yet, Fildes says "computer models and Mathematics suggest it will work."

MIT researcher Marin Soljacic explains, "There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years. We started thinking, 'It would be really convenient if you didn't have to recharge these things.' And because we're physicists, we asked, 'What kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?'"

The proposed solution, Fildes says, is resonance -- "a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency in applied." Soljacic says resonance can be used to transfer energy from one object to another.

"Hence, a simple copper antenna designed to have long-lived resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency," Fildes writes. "The computer would be truly wireless."

The research is being presented this week at the 2006 AIP Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco.