Although movie and game producers can now create computer-animated images of just about anything, the sounds made by those onscreen items still typically consist of recordings of real-world objects.

Researchers have come up with a new and improved way to levitate objects using sound waves alone, an impressive feat of mixed-reality technology that could pave the way for some seriously futuristic ...

Access more than 20 years of online content Manage which e-mail newsletters you want to receive Read about the big breakthroughs and innovations across 13 scientific topics Explore the key issues and ...

It may seem straight out of "Star Trek," but it's real: Scientists have created a sonic "tractor beam" that can pull, push and pirouette objects that levitate in thin air. The sonic tractor beam ...

An artist's rendering shows an acoustic hologram trapping a particle over a levitation device. Courtesy Asier Marzo, Bruce Drinkwater and Sriram Subramanian It's no Mattel hoverboard. But a device ...

The Voyager 1 space probe is the farthest human-made object in space. It launched in 1977 with a golden record on board that carried assorted sounds of our home planet: greetings in many different ...

Scientists are continuing to experiment with levitating small objects using sonic tractor beams, or sound waves, which can suspend and move objects mid-air. A new video of the technology shows small ...

Seeing an object at the same time that you hear sound coming from somewhere else can lead to the 'ventriloquist illusion' and its aftereffect, but research suggests that simply imagining the object ...

Forget superconductors and magnetic fields. Scientists from the University of Tokyo have developed a way to use sound waves to levitate objects and move them around midair. When a sound wave travels ...