Friday, December 01, 2006

great, but where's my flying car and hoverboard you promised?


straight from the horse's mouth:

"Researchers for at least two decades have used acoustic levitation to suspend light materials without a container. Wenjun Xie, a materials physicist at Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, has previously used ultrasound fields to levitate globs of iridium and mercury, very heavy materials. Now the scientist has performed the feat with live animals. From the story: 'Xie and his colleagues employed an ultrasound emitter and reflector that generated a sound pressure field between them. The emitter produced roughly 20-millimeter-wavelength sounds, meaning it could in theory levitate objects half that wavelength or less.' Apparently the ants, spiders and ladybugs endured the trick just fine, but the fish didn't do so well due to lack of water."


1 Comments:

Blogger jps said...

I want a scaled up one for humans. It'd be fun to suspend ne'er do wells and hoody wearers in them in shoppin centres.

5:00 PM  

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