Intel on Friday said it is researching technology to harvest free energy from the environment, which could lead to devices such as mobile phones running for indefinite periods without recharging.

The company is working on tiny sensors that can capture energy from sources such as sunlight and body heat. In the future, such energy could be used to power personal electronic devices such as cell phones.

There are already watches available that are powered by body heat, as well as prototype smartphones with display screens that double as solar cells, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, during a press event. Intel is also looking at powering a mobile phone by harvesting the energy the user generates by moving the phone’s trackball. The radiation of cell phone or TV signals might also be used to power devices.

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Chipmaker Intel Corp is further expanding its successful IT-assisted teacher-training programme in Malaysia.

Intel said it has trained a small but ­significant percentage of teachers in the last eight years and hopes to double that to 100,000 teachers over the next five years.

The Intel Teach programme was started in 1999 and has trained about five million teachers worldwide in over 40 countries. Introduced in Malaysia in 2000, about 50,000 local teachers have been trained under this programme, according to Intel Malaysia officials.

Senior trainers host teaching classes for current and prospective teachers who are interested in improving their pedagogic skills.

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At this week’s Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan, Intel conducted its first public demonstration of Moorestown — a new Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform that company executives say will “increase battery life an order of magnitude” in a variety of portable devices.

With the launch of Moorestown, Intel is on track to reduce “idle power by more than 10 times compared to the first-generation MIDs based on the Intel Atom processor,” said Intel Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher, who is also general manager of the company’s ultra mobility group.

Mobile Internet

Moorestown consists of two silicon-based devices, a system on a chip (SoC) and a companion hub chip. Code-named Lincroft, the SoC integrates an Intel Atom processor and memory controller with graphics and video encode/decode capabilities. The platform’s Langwell hub chip provides support for the I/O ports that connect the platform’s SoC to wireless, storage and display components.

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