

A Momentous Shift for Sonic Levitation - jfdi
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/07/a-momentous-shift-for-sonic-levi.html?ref=hp

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andrewflnr
First thing I thought of: maybe we can use it to study liquid tungsten.
[http://what-if.xkcd.com/50/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/50/). Lift a tiny piece,
then heat it with lasers?

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Tarrosion
How does such a system work with very hot matter, e.g. plasma in a fusion
chamber?

I assume some sort of medium (i.e. not vacuum) is needed to propagate the
waves, and that at the temperatures necessary for fusion the medium would turn
to plasma and the vibrating plates would melt. But I'd certainly like to be
wrong.

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dakotasmith
Additional videos from source:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/07/10/1301860110.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/07/10/1301860110.DCSupplemental)

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hosh
Is this the prerequisite tech for a sonic screwdriver?

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contingencies
Hah. Try as I might, I can't resist commenting that I read on some BBS .txt
file way back in the early '90s that some monks in the Himalayas used to sit
in specific positions (in a semicircle or something?) when large rocks needed
to be moved. They would chant and drum and the things would be rendered far
easier to shift. Specific reference was made to levitation, and the text was
from a western observer's account. I'm not a physicist or saying this is true,
just that I read the above 20+ years ago and it stuck in my head as an oddity.
Reading this article, it came to the fore. Personally I wouldn't be half
surprised if eventually it comes out that the careful use of human or
percussion-producible frequencies can facilitate a similar effect to that
described in this article.

