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Acoustic Levitation Works On Small Animals
anthemaniac writes "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."
One might also wonder about some of the biological effects of energy this high, especially with animals that contain more water. Heating is always a concern and something that many high powered ultrasound devices have not adequately addressed with developing biological systems.
As an aside, I seem to remember that former Admiral Bobby Inman served on the board of directors for (SAIC) and was involved in some acoustic work along these lines, but I think they were focusing on inanimate objects. I could be wrong about that, but it came out of a conversation I had years ago with members of the science directorate.
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It's even easier to get fish to levitate in water if you never feed them.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I for one welcome our levitating ant overlords.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Come on. A spider ISN'T an aminal. When I read "small aminal" the first thing I think of is Benji the Dog for example. Call me when you can levitate Benji. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This concept is straight out of the worst episode of Farscape, and that's saying something.
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I was once lay on the bed and my cat decided to curl up in the small of my back.
When I let out a ripper of a fart I swear he hovered right there for about 15 seconds.
(Incidentally, after that event he never lay on my back again)
liqbase
"but the fish didn't do so well due to lack of water." To devise a fairer system of test, a team of our researchers spent eighteen months in Antarctica living like penguins, and subsequently dying like penguins - only quicker - proving that the penguin is a clever little sod in his own environment. /python
I always suspected that Adam Ant had no sense of hearing.
Where were you when the voynix came?
...the fish didn't do so well due to lack of water
;-)
I bet it was from the levitaiton. That's why they used fish. Needed another excuse
These experiments were performed with 20 mm wavelangth sound. Thats 50 Hz to you and me. So how long until the guys with the subwoofer equipped cars convert them to hovercraft?
"It's even easier to get fish to levitate in water if you never feed them."
One stick of dynamite does the job a lot quicker.
Where were you when the voynix came?
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I'll have you know that none of those animals were small. The System Reference Document doesn't list them, but I'm confident they'd be identified as "diminutive," or smaller still.
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...welcome our flying ant/spider/dead fish overlords!
They have magnetic levitation for fish and frogs.
"but the fish didn't do so well due to lack of water"
Is that even funny??
"The ant and ladybug appeared fine after 30 minutes of levitation, although the fish did not fare as well, due to the inadequate water supply, the scientists report."
You've already established that you can levitate objects. This was the 8-year-old doing a science experiment. I bet they fried the ants with a magnifying glass later. I admit it is interesting albeit rather pointless. The part about the fish was priceless... "didn't fare well". It makes me want to say, "No shit, Sherlock."
Now it's levitating spiders? I am so screwed.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
I am going to get one of these rigs next time I go fishing. Lay it in the water, turn it on and all the fish rise up above the surface... perfect!! Mmmm sushi.... D
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
Says the 22nd century grandpa: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... NOW PUT ME DOWN YOU KIDS!!!
And here I thought heavy metal just made you feel like you being bounced off the ground.
A spider may well nott be an aminal, whatever that is.
With respect to the TFA, the ricers and low riders in these parts have been sonically levitating themselves for years, I can hear them two friggin miles away. If it causes them brain damage, how would we know?
"I for one welcome our levitating ant overlords."
Come on, it wasn't that good of a movie! You also aren't going to have any levitating without that little Putin elf guy, anyway.
Where were you when the voynix came?
AC/DC has been doing it for awhile.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
17 kHz is audible to humans and most animals. I wonder how loud the sound was in order to achieve levitation.
Cue the PETA spokesperson in 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..
...that sheep do not fly as much as they do plummet.
You never expect irony, do you?
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It's called dynamite fishing, or in it's much more manageable form, an M80 firecracker and a couple drunk guys in a boat with a net. Y'all should come South a bit more often.
I once snuck up on and yelled "Boo" at a rather high strung cat. He levitated about three feet in the air for a moment too.
That's acoustic levitation if I ever saw it.
When I was 15 I went to see Iggy and the Stooges at the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. I had to hitchhike from Chicago with a vague hope that I'd be able to get tickets and get into the concert.
When I left, I was 5 feet off the ground. Even 30+ years later, I can listen to Raw Power and get the same effect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I new my ipod made me feel lighter.
I'm just walking along, minding my own ant business, and all of sudden some jackass decides to levitate me. Oh, that's right, it's so funny to pick on the ants. Everyone picks on the ants. We're just trying to make a living and feed the queen...she gets to drink nectar. Think the rest of us get any nectar? Not us worker ants. You try running around blind trying to follow a scent trail during allergy season. We get stepped on, eaten by other bugs and birds...don't get me started. And then there's the nursery, those ingrates never get enough. Like it's not bad enough putting up with their crap along comes to the dominant species and thinks it's just SO funny to levitate us. Suppose I should be glad they didn't roast us under a magnifying glass like the neighbor kid. Little delinquent. I'll be he grows up to be a career criminal. It's all so meaningless.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Excellent that this should be on Slashdot the same day I get James Blish's Cities in Flight book series. I, for one, can't wait till Pittsburgh relocates to Mars and starts a mining operation.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
when pigs fly
Anyone else here thinking electric football table?
"Yeah, but last time I did that, my mom^H^H^Hwife got a little upset about the mess in the basement."
Oeddy, is that you??? Man, it's been a long time. Better give Dr. Siggy a call: he says it has been a long time since you've surfed his couch. Too long, I think.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Let's levitate little Sebastian,
his grandma will get a kick.
...has previously used ultrasound fields to levitate globs of iridium and mercury, very heavy materials.
Heavy Metal levitated by a low frequency bass oscillator. Rock On!!
I can levitate birds. Nobody cares.
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My mother was a levitating ant overlord, you insensitive clod!
When I was a just a child I figured out how to use a magnifying glass to levitate ants, spiders and ladybugs in the form of smoke.
No video clips of the insects and fish? :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
When my father used to yell, we'd come off the sofa a couple of feet.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
A girl can blow lightly and levitate things. I don't know what the problem is.\
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This story is useless without video of a kitten slowly rotating in midair.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
Whoa, dude, I don't know about you, but when that happens, mine stays attached.
20mm wavelength seems to be 17KHz (at sealevel in air), which isn't very "ultra" sound. To levitate the 3 meters radius of adult humans (with extended arms/legs), we'd need 6m wavelength. That's about 0.04Hz, which is infrasound. How much energy would have to input to an infrasound generator to levitate a 100Kg person?
--
make install -not war
no text
The flying mice overlords are here!
if I had a laptop that only cost $100 I'd know that
well, since they've got it so they can levitate small things, it should (it never is) simply be a matter of scaling up whatever they used to make the soundwaves (TFA is /.ed, so i can't read it) to produce enough energy to levitate larger objects. though one would have to wonder about the limits of this before it causes adverse effects on whatever is being levitated.
this seems an awful lot like dimagnetic levitation. it is theoretically possible to levitate pretty much anything, but you need really, really strong magnets (into the range of kiloteslas) to make it happen.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This is absolutely true; I can provide photos (or you can come see for yourself)
The defunct business next door to my house has signs saying "$500 reward leading to the arrest and conviction of persons destroying this property." There was what looked like a very weatherbeaten, unmaintained house and a large tin structure that looked like it too had not been maintained in years; gutters falling, etc.
Then last March 12th two F2 tornados tore through here. It ripped the hell out of both structures (again, I took pictures). The structures were subsequently razed.
So if you can find God and get him in court, $500 is yours for the taking!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I want to know when they're going to figure out how to use these sonic waves to drive screws.
Not only that he's a ventriloquist. He'll project the noise of his extremely loud farts to make it seem like I'm farting. So I'll yell at him, Dog!, and then he levitates. Not only that he'll project the smell of his farts too. For some reason my wife doesn't believe me. She became extremely suspicious that the farting dog started just after I managed to kill the last barking spider in the house.
How much power...well lots. Area of human (one side) about 1sq. m. mass, (order of magnitude) 100Kg, say 1KN force required = 1Megapascal. That's 10bar pressure, implying an acoustic pressure of 10dB above atmospheric..or 203dB into 4pi space.
Imagine you had a 'regular' hifi speaker, radiating into half space..and that it behaved in a perfectly linear manner to power input (no chance!) at the typical 1% efficiency of electrical-to-acoustic conversion, you' need to hit it with, oh, about a half megawatt. Really. Which means poor sorry-assed-but-levitated-human falls apart.
(assumptions: 87dB/watt for reasonable speaker; +3dB gain for half-space; power required = 10^ [(200-87)/20] )
Are any of the fusion researchers looking into this? If they can counteract gravity, maybe they can even push in from all directions and use it to contain the plasma. Then again, maybe you have to supply so much acoustic energy that you wouldn't get enough energy back from the reaction... but IANANuclear researcher. Anybody else here know?
when you typed the URL... sorry, "address" into your internet explorer in windows XP, you misspelled "myspace" as "slashdot". It's ok, my learning disabled daughter does it all the time.
Oh my god! It's full of nerds!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Not the post, but the fact that some dumbass modded it "insoghtful". WTF?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
People Eating Tasty Animals!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Very cool video of them levitating all kinds of light things.
The first thing I wondered while watching is: why can't you flip that device upsidedown, increase the power, and make the ultimate hovercraft? This technology seems like it has military applications written all over it. And one poster has already mentioned Bobby Inman worked on this technology back in the 80's. Bobby Inman is definitely military (intelligence though, not R&D or skunkworks).
I'm not suggesting some super secret conspiracy, but it seems obvious that the military would be interested in something like this. So, why isn't a hovercraft like this possible, given enough power input (think: nuke on a sub) and enough downward amplification?
Has anyone ever heard of anything such as this? I haven't. There are certainly lots of acoustic applications in the military (crowd control, ship defense, etc) but I haven't ever heard of an acoustic hovercraft or transport of anykind.
Thanks for fixing my math to find the required frequency. I'm looking for the energy delivered to the levitating person, not the required electric energy to produce it, because an electrical speaker isn't necessarily the power source.
How much power does, say, Pavarotti's loudest singing in the 57Hz range (50-60Hz) deliver at, say, 10m? Maybe we're talking kilopavarottis.
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make install -not war
i think this just about confirms the science of sound.
How much power...well lots. Area of human (one side) about 1sq. m. mass, (order of magnitude) 100Kg, say 1KN force required = 1Megapascal. That's 10bar pressure, implying an acoustic pressure of 10dB above atmospheric..or 203dB into 4pi space.
t _work.asp?css=1
1KN of force into one square meter is one kilopascal.
Which by this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure
gives us 154 dB SPL, and that won't be any fun at all. At least the wavelength is big, so maybe the shear forces on our organs won't cause the kinds of damage that dynamite does when it goes off near a fish.
Hey, here's an idea: Let's set the frequency equal to zero and do this. Oh wait, they already have:
http://www.airkix.com/airkix_explained/how_does_i
This is a good example of animal research that is completely unnecessary. There's absolutely no point or scientific benefit in using animals for this experiment. The researchers were clearly just looking for a wacky headline to get press coverage, while giving good fuel to the animal rights activists who point out that the current state of animal research is ludicrous.
And is it possible for animals to have cavities or structures with a resonant frequency equal to that of the emitted waves? That's where the real danger lies, I think.
"I don't know how you can say that. Although I will admit that the possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely unlikely."
a long time ago, They were just 90 degrees off.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Nothing would be exciting about a dried pea suspended on ultrasonic waves.
Nor a dust bunny.
Not even a booger.
A bug that is trying to walk, crawl, or fly away, however.. ** THAT'S ** news! Especially considering that this piece is from China..
They have a healthier understanding of their relationship with other Earth critters than we do in the west.
To me the video seemed like two tubes that generated a derivation from Bernoulli effect.
Some readers seem to mix up infra and ultra. Ultrasound is high frequency sounds.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound
Apparently the ants, spiders and ladybugs endured the trick just fine, but the fish didn't do so well due to lack of water.
I'm sure there's a whale joke in there somewhere...
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Are Chinese researchers really so dumb that they didn't know fish kept out of water for 30 minutes would die? They report that the fish didn't do so well as if it was a genuine experiment. What is the point of killing things for no reason? Research is fine, but it's not research when you already know the outcome.
I know it sounds like a bunch of old wank, but maybe there's some truth to this. Exactly how sophisticated does the tech have to be to produce the necessary sound waves? For those of us who've been to these ruins and seen the stones first hand, it's pretty hard to imagine anyone moving them by hand, even with infinite resources and manpower. Thoughts?
Work smarter, not harder.
You mean KPa? Clearly the SI unit of pressure. The Pavarotti - (Pa). Everyone knows Pascal wasn't much of a singer.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
Somewhere a New Line Cinema executive is having a eureka moment
There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
Seems to me that there have been a few cases of the navy using "experimental high powered sonar that caused extreme distress to marine life. Several incidents caused dolphins, etc. to beach themselves; they were found to be bleeding from the ears. Of course that portion of the sea was closed to the public during the trials for security reasons.
I'm not saying that the navy was doing levitation experiments, but wouldn't you expect it to look something like that if they were?
Just occurred to me that, even if not practical for levitation, it may be practical for torpedo defense (e.g. forming a "shield" under water), especially since the effect works better in denser materials like water.
science is a religion
And they needed a science project to prove that fish need water? Next they will tell us that we can't breath without air!
I have a metal box at work that levitates me... I don't know how but it seems to be done using dull almost but not quite recognisable music