I thought levitation is a lost science. There’s some conjecture that it helped with the building of the pyramids. And I have also heard about Tibetan monks who use levitation to move stones.
Scientists have now levitated small live animals using sounds that are, well, uplifting.
In the past, researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, used ultrasound fields to successfully levitate globs of the heaviest solid and liquid-iridium and mercury, respectively. The aim of their work is to learn how to manufacture everything from pharmaceuticals to alloys without the aid of containers. At times compounds are too corrosive for containers to hold, or they react with containers in other undesirable ways.
As to this an interesting question arises, what will happen if a living animal is put into the acoustic field? Will it also steadily levitate?
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.
After the investigators got the ultrasound field going, they used tweezers to carefully place animals between the emitter and reflector. The scientists found they could float ants, beetles, spiders, ladybugs, bees, tadpoles and fish up to a little more than a third of an inch long in midair. Apparently the ants, spiders and ladybugs endured the trick just fine, but the fish didn’t do so well due to lack of water though the researchers added water to the ultrasound field every minute via syringe.
Via: Livescience
