Sound Waves Used to Levitate and Move Objects (Video)

Sound waves can levitate and move objects through space, according to the three researchers and coauthors of a recent study, Jun Rekimoto, Takayuki Hoshi and Yoichi Ochiai — but, they’re not wizards, no — they are scientists from the University of Tokyo. Their study is called “Three-dimensional Mid-air Acoustic Manipulation by Ultrasonic Phased Arrays.”

It’s been claimed and might some day be proven that sound waves brought the walls of Jericho tumbling down. These three scientists, however, weren’t examining the potential of using sound as a WMD, but were trying to use a levitation rig and ultrasonic standing waves to move objects in and through space, and essentially, time, if Einstein was right.

The technical term for what the scientists are doing with sound waves is acoustic levitation. The idea and dream of being able to levitate objects acoustically has been around for thousands of years, but it is now becoming a reality.

The paper that the three researchers wrote was submitted just this past month to the Arxiv science site at Cornell University. While objects, and even live frogs, have been levitated using magnetism, and some objects have previously been levitated using sound waves, this is the first time that researchers have figured out how to also move the levitated objects.

Did the researchers attempt to levitate an elephant using sound waves?

The researchers are starting off modestly, as far as size goes — they have no plans to levitate anything the size of an elephant, at least not until they can work up to something that size, gradually.

The study is based on the scientists using high-frequency sound waves to levitate objects which are extremely light. Then, after they levitate or suspend the objects in the air, the researchers have discovered how to move the objects through space by manipulating the sonic waves, something that they couldn’t do with their earlier experiments where they tried bouncing sound waves off of solid surfaces.

Past experiments involving sound waves to levitate objects in mid-air used in-line speakers and utilized sound reflected, or bounced off of, a sound-reflecting surface. The method that the three scientists from Tokyo detail in their study is very different, though.

They didn’t use speakers lined up in a row. Instead, they used four arrays of speakers, facing towards each other, so that they sound emanating from all of the speakers converged into a single focal point where the ultrasonic waves met and merged together. Where the sonic waves converged at this focal point was, the researchers found, an ideal place to levitate small objects.

Russian Billionaire Announces $3M Mathematics Prize

Top mathematicians will be rewarded for thinking big under a new $3 million prize announced by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Milner, a self-described “failed physicist” who made his fortune in high-tech investments, told The Guardian that he wanted the new Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics to encourage people to think more deeply about life. The prize will be awarded for the first time next year.

“If you take the largest scales possible, there are a number of scientists, individuals, who operate at that scale, they think about the whole universe. I think that we focus too much on small scales as human beings, and not enough on larger scales. That’s really the problem we’re trying to address here,” he told the paper Thursday.

The new prize was unveiled at an awards ceremony in the United States for two other multi-million-dollar research prizes established by Milner. The Fundamental Physics Prize, which he founded last year, was shared between Michael Green of Cambridge University and John Schwarz of the California Institute of Technology.

Water squishes into stable shapes, no container required

Nanoparticles lock together to hold water in place for more than a month

WARPED WATER A tiny ball of water holds its football shape for days because nanoparticles coating it lock together to trap it.

Distorted droplets of water can hold their elongated shapes for weeks when surrounded by a thin layer of nanoparticles.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst plunged water droplets loaded with plastic nanoparticles into a mix of oil and silicone polymer. Submerged in the slimy solution, the water’s nanoparticles floated to the edges of the droplets and interacted with the silicone polymer to form a detergent, which coated each ball of water. The researchers then flipped on an electrical current, which stretched the water droplets and their detergent layers into a football shape.

Scientists grow mini brains from stem cells

A cross-section of a brain organoid shows neural stem cells in red, and neurons in green.

We've seen beating heart tissue, windpipes and bladders all grown from stem cells. Now researchers have taken another important step forward by growing mini brains from these programmable cells.

They're not actually functioning brains -- in the same way that a car with the engine on its roof or wheels on its hood isn't a drivable vehicle -- but the parts are there, and that's an important scientific advancement, according to Juergen Knoblich, senior author of a new study on using stem cells to grow brain tissue.

Scientists have created what they are calling "cerebral organoids" using stem cells. These pea-sized structures are made of human brain tissue, and they can help researchers explore important questions about brain development and disorders that occur during these first stages of life.

The organoids, as described in the journal Nature, have components resembling those of a brain of a 9- or 10-week-old embryo, said lead study author Madeline Lancaster, a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna, at a press briefing Tuesday.

She and colleagues have created hundreds of these organoids.

At this early stage of human development, several key regions of the brain are already distinctive features, including the dorsal cortex, the ventral forebrain, the choroid plexus -- which generates cerebrospinal fluid -- and regions that resemble the midbrain and hindbrain. Lancaster and colleagues say they've identified some of those same regions in these new mini brains.

UW Researcher Moves Another Human's Finger with his Thoughts

It's the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface to do so.

Many new studies have shown that people can control things -- like video games or a cursor on a screen -- only with their thoughts, but a new project takes this to the next level: people controlling other people with their thoughts.

A new study by University of Washington researchers -- led by Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco -- created the first human-to-human brain interface that is noninvasive. It allowed the thoughts of one researcher to manipulate movement of another.

The study used electroencephalography (EEG) -- which is used to record brain activity noninvasively from the scalp -- and transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a noninvasive way of delivering stimulation to the brain to obtain a response.

Rao sat in his laboratory, where he wore a cap hooked up to electrodes. The electrodes were connected to an electroencephalography machine in order to read the electrical activity in his brain.

Meanwhile, Stocco was in his laboratory across campus with a swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil. The coil was positioned over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement. There was a Skype connection between the two labs for coordination purposes, but neither Stocco nor Rao could see the Skype screens.

Rao was playing a video game with his mind, where he had to imagine moving his right hand in order to fire a cannon at a specific target. When he did this correctly, a cursor would hit the "fire" button.

Other researchers on the team (computer science and engineering undergraduates Matthew Bryan, Bryan Djunaedi, Joseph Wu and Alex Dadgar, along with bioengineering graduate student Dev Sarma) wrote the computer code for the study, which translated Rao’s brain signals into a command for Stocco’s brain.

It's Not Your Imagination: Mosquitoes Love Some People More

Here's why mosquitos ravage you but leave your friend untouched.

When you sit around evening barbecues or lakeside campfires this summer, you may notice a few friends bemoaning mosquito bites more than others. This might not be because they're the complaining type: The bloodsuckers are more attracted to certain body chemistries.

 Female mosquitoes need blood to reproduce (males don't lay eggs and thus don't bite). In order to eat blood, these ravenous female mosquitoes first need to find it, which means sniffing out a host to bite. The insects do this, in part, via smell receptors on their antennae and mouths. Just as we use smell receptors in our nose to detect the aroma wafting from our favorite food, a mosquito's smell receptors uniquely respond to chemical signals emanating from a host's body. 

 So far, scientists have found that the human body gives off several hundred such chemicals. You, your friends, and everyone else each has a unique chemical signature with different blends and concentrations; the unlucky ones with more of the ingredients that attract mosquitoes are more likely to be bitten. 

 This doesn't mean that certain people are more attractive to all mosquitoes, says Ulirich Bernier, Ph.D., a research chemist and mosquito attractant expert at the Agricultural Research Service at the United States Department of Agriculture. There are around 3,000 mosquito species worldwide, each with a unique set of receptors that make them more or less drawn to certain body chemistries. This can make the same person more appealing to one species of mosquito than another. 

Bernier says it may also explain why certain species are more attracted to humans than to other animals, such as Anopheles gambiae , a major spreader of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa that feeds almost solely on people. 

Battery Made From Wood — Efficient, Long-Lasting, Environmentally-Friendly Battery Developed

An environmentally-friendly, efficient, and long-lasting battery created out of wood? Sounds too good to be true? Well it may not be — researchers say that they have now developed just such a battery.

The tiny new battery — composed of a sliver of wood coated with tin — appears to have great potential, already showing itself to be among the most long-lasting of all sodium-ion nanobatteries. The researchers think that batteries based on this new technology would be best suited for large-scale energy storage — such as storing the excess energy produced by some renewable energy installations — due to the relatively low cost of the materials involved.

With regards to the inspiration for the battery design — the researchers had noted that wood fibers are naturally designed to hold mineral-rich water, water that is very similar to the electrolyte in batteries… Why not explore the use of wood as the base of an experimental sodium-ion battery? This would help to address to reality “that today’s batteries often use stiff, non-flexible substrates, which are too rigid to release the stress that occurs as ions flow through the battery.”

Invisibility cloaking in 'perfect' demonstration

The trick included developing a diamond-shaped
cloaking region - invisible only from one direction

Scientists have succeeded in "cloaking" an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves.

Many "invisibility cloak" efforts have been demonstrated, but all have reflected some of the incident light, making the illusion incomplete.

A Nature Materials study has now shown how to pull off the trick flawlessly.

However, the illusion only works from one direction and would be difficult to achieve with visible light.

The idea of invisibility cloaking got its start in 2006 when John Pendry of Imperial College London and David Schurig and David Smith of Duke University laid out the theory of "transformation optics" in a paper in Science, demonstrating it for the first time using microwaves (much longer wavelengths than we can see) in another Science paper later that year.

The papers sparked a flurry of activity to move the work on to different wavelengths - namely those in which we see.

As the "Where's my cloak of invisibility?" article points out, the field has moved on considerably since then.

But no effort to date has been able to achieve the "perfect" cloaking that the theory originally described.

The structures that can pull off this extraordinary trick of the light are difficult to manufacture, and each attempt has made an approximation to the theoretical idea that results in reflections.

It's like the card people in Alice in Wonderland... If they turn on their sides you can't see them but they're obviously visible if you look from the other direction - Prof David Smith (Duke University)

So someone would not see a cloaked object but rather the scene behind it - however, the reflections from the cloak would make that scene appear somewhat darkened.

Scientists Learn How to Turn Innovations into Jobs

Science and techno world topic: Research

Many of today's best researchers and scientists need someone to show them the money. They face the same dilemma that alchemists faced centuries ago: how do you turn basic research (a base metal) into a commercially viable business (gold)?  The National Science Foundation thinks its innovative I-Corps program will succeed where the alchemists failed.  The early results are promising.

The NSF's I-Corps program, now one year into a three-year pilot program, teaches top scientists and engineers how to turn their fundamental research discoveries into successful businesses and jobs.

Teams composed of academic researchers, student entrepreneurs (undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs) and business mentors participate in the six-month program. The curriculum is a hypothesis-based approach to assessing technological readiness that combines two site-based short courses, extensive online coaching and hands-on outreach to potential customers.

[How to Turn Your Tech Dreams Into Business Reality]               

 The program merges the structured coursework with guidance from NSF program officers and leading entrepreneurs who have committed their time to the program.

"Academic researchers already have many skills valuable for success in business, such as critical thinking, teamwork and an ability to move in a new direction and learn when a hypothesis proves false," said Errol Arkilic, NSF program director for I-Corps. "The NSF I-Corps builds upon that expertise, introducing researchers to the business community and teaching them to seek, and speak to, the needs of potential customers."