Video: Government Wizards Levitate Drugs With Ultrasonic Sound
Levitating Drugs Dan HarrisTo create brand-new drugs, pharmaceutical researchers have turned to levitating them with blasts of ultrasonic sound. Good drugs dissolve easily in the body. Bad pharmaceutical molecules, meanwhile, lock themselves into hard-to-absorb crystals that require strong doses to work, and this overcompensation often leads to crummy side effects. Unfortunately, the very lab equipment that pharmaceutical researchers use to create new crystal-free drugs can cause the molecules to crystallize. To get around this conundrum, science wizards at Argonne National Laboratory, a government-run facility southwest of Chicago, counteract gravity with two opposing speakers. Each speaker pumps out sound at 22,000 hertz--just beyond the upper range of human hearing--and form a standing sound wave that can trap blobs of dissolved experimental compounds. The technique isn't a way to mass-manufacture new drugs, at least yet. But the stuff floating...