Never a dull moment. Technology never stops evolving, thanks to dedicated innovators from all over the world. Now, here’s something that could make Nikola Tesla’s dream a reality: Wi-Fi powered electronics. In this era, we’re surrounded by Wi-Fi almost everywhere we go  – local area networking technology allows electronic devices to connect to the network. However, some raised the question: are we using this technology to its full potential? Every time I think of Wi-Fi, my subconscious shares a second with Nikola Tesla, the man who was keen on making wires redundant. Researchers at the University of Washington wish to fulfill Tesla’s dream with PoWiFi. The engineers released a new type of technology that uses a Wi-Fi router—a source of ubiquitous, but untapped energy in indoor environments—to power devices. This new system, dubbed Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi), is one of the most innovative technologies of the year—Popular Science included it in the annual “Best of What’s New” awards. The researchers recently published a paper that shows how they managed to harvest energy from Wi-Fi signals and then to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera, and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet. The final paper will be presented next month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Germany, on emerging networking experiments and technologies. “For the first time we’ve shown that you can use Wi-Fi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices,” said lead author Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. “We also made a system that can co-exist as a Wi-Fi router and a power source—it doesn’t degrade the quality of your Wi-Fi signals while it’s powering devices.” What this means is that electricity flows wirelessly through the air, but don’t...