There's electricity in the air. A rabbit's beating heart has been regulated using a tiny pacemaker that beams in energy from outside its body. It is the first time this kind of wireless energy transfer has been demonstrated in a living animal. If such wirelessly powered medical implants can work in people too, it would reduce the seriousness of the procedures required to get them fitted.
"Our device is small, so it will be much easier to deliver into the body," says Ada Poon of Stanford University in California, who led the team that implanted the tiny pacemaker.
Being fitted with a pacemaker currently requires surgery plus another operation when the battery eventually runs down. So Poon and her colleagues outfitted a rabbit with a pacemaker that has no battery and is just 3 millimetres long (see picture, above right). A metal plate, powered only by a cellphone battery, was then held a couple of centimetres above the rabbit's chest.
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