Carbon nanotubes in a dish assemble themselves into a nanowire in seconds under the influence of a custom-built Tesla coil created by scientists at Rice University.
But the scientists don’t limit their aspirations for the phenomenon they call Teslaphoresis to simple nanowires.
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How can anyone NOT love science?!
Holograms (3-D light fields) can be projected from a 2-dimensional surface to control objects. (credit: Asier Marzo, Bruce Drinkwater and Sriram Subramanian)
Continue reading “Holographic sonic tractor beam lifts and moves objects using soundwaves” »
Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex, in collaboration with Ultrahaptics, have built the world’s first sonic tractor beam that can lift and move objects using sound waves.
Details of the device, published in Nature Communications, describe how the tractor beam uses high-amplitude sound waves to generate an acoustic hologram that is capable of picking up and moving small objects. The technique comes straight from the pages of a science-fiction novel.
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Levitation and the defiance of gravity is possible. If until now levitation was just a magic act or circus “reality” or, tractor beam technology existed just in sci-fi movies, recently, a team of Japanese researchers have demonstrated the first technology that not only brings the mythology of levitation to life but leap frogs it to create a tractor beam, lifting and moving objects across 3 dimensions using sound alone.
The essence of levitation technology is the countervailing of gravity. By stoping gravity, levitation is possible. It is known that an ultrasound standing wave is capable of suspending small particles at its sound pressure nodes. The acoustic axis of the ultrasound beam in conventional studies was parallel to the gravitational force, and the levitated objects were manipulated along the fixed axis (i.e. one-dimensionally) by controlling the phases or frequencies of bolted Langevin-type transducers.
