Selections from the recent literature

Put a live creature in the beamline, get a nature paper. Thats one of the odd truths inherent in boring accelerator research. It is not your core materials research that gets you the fancy paper. It is the time the biologist convinces you to glue an ant to the stage and do radiography of the trapped critter drinking.

It seems some ultrasonic researchers caught on to this and got this puppy published:
from XieW. J., et al. Appl. Phys. Lett., 89 . 214102 (2006).



Living creatures levitated by ultrasonic waves. Woo! None the worse for the wear apparently, except for the fish, quoting from the abstract:

" The vitality of ant and ladybug is not evidently influenced during the acoustic levitation, whereas that of the young fish is reduced because of the inadequacy of water supply."

Got it? Fish need water to live. Oh yeah, and if your acoustic waves are strong enough and around the size of tiny lightweight things, you can levitate them. They use this for materials and physics research, but did they get any press for that? Nope, only when they put the the ant, ladybug and young fish in the contraption.

Nice job gentlemen. I file this under people who have more fun doing research than me.

Read the nature summary here