Science Made Cool

Here Comes Science Concert plug

A contingent of Zygotes just got back from seeing They Might Be Giants in concert; the band is promoting their new kids album, Here Comes Science. The show was fun and included this number, which is near and dear to our bone-digging hearts:

Sound Beams!

A few years ago we mentioned the nifty technology of "Sonic Blasters." While the name is awesomely cool, the actual device is essentially nothing but a really loud speaker. Not the stuff of true science fiction. Well, science has finally caught up with fiction. Researchers in Nottingham and Ukraine have developed the world's first working "SASER." The "SASER" uses the same principle as a laser, applied to sound -- it emits a super high-frequency sound beam. It has tremendous potential applications in nanotechnology and imaging, among others.

One application the linked article is rather coy about is how, um, destructive a terahertz sound beam might be. The higher the frequency, the higher the energy. A terahertz is a frequency of 1 trillion oscillations per second; by contrast, human hearing maxes out at 20 thousand hertz, so SASER emissions ought to be on the order of 10 million times more energetic than the noises we can hear. (Experts on acoustics are encouraged to tell me what I'm getting wrong.)

So while it seems unlikely that SASERS will be able to vaporize people or shoot down spaceships, it does sound like they could do some damage in the hands of a suitably mad scientist. Or really mess up some pirates.