Chinese mad scientists levitate fish with sound

By Paul Miller | December 1, 2006

You can pour over that gift-guide all you want, but in the end all most of us really want for the holidays is peace on earth. Short of that, levitating fish comes always comes in as a close second in our inter-office pools, so it looks like we’ve got ourselves a little Festivus miracle on our hands: using merely the powers of sound waves, some crazy Chinese scientists have managed to achieve sustained levitation of small objects, with their most recent achievements being a whole collection of small insects, a tadpole, fish eggs and even a fish. Of course, in our imagination the fish always have cute little water bubbles around their heads, but in these tests the fish “did not fare as well” as its air-breathing companions, despite the scientists’ attempts at injecting water into the levitation field. Sad. Apparently the real purpose of these tests is to develop a method of handling dangerous compounds without the risks introduced by using a container which could potentially corrode or react badly with the compound. We can’t say as much for the industrial applications of levitating fish, but it’s still pretty dang awesome.

[Via Futurismic]

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