Acoustic Levitation

If you’ve ever seen a concert at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Ore., you’d say that music could make you levitate. (The same could perhaps be said for those that make a pilgrimage each year to the Black Rock Desert of Nevada for Burning Man.) But scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have actually discovered a way to use sound waves – at frequencies slightly higher than humans can hear – to levitate individual droplets of solutions. While the acoustic levitator was originally developed for NASA to simulate microgravity conditions, Argonne scientists are using it to help improve the efficiency and quality of the pharmaceutical drug development process. No word yet on whether the music of Carly Rae Jepsen yields the same results.