A Momentous Shift for Sonic Levitation

First thing I thought of: maybe we can use it to study liquid tungsten. http://what-if.xkcd.com/50/. Lift a tiny piece, then heat it with lasers?

How does such a system work with very hot matter, e.g. plasma in a fusion chamber?

I assume some sort of medium (i.e. not vacuum) is needed to propagate the waves, and that at the temperatures necessary for fusion the medium would turn to plasma and the vibrating plates would melt. But I'd certainly like to be wrong.

Additional videos from source:

http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/07/10/1301860110.DCSu...

Is this the prerequisite tech for a sonic screwdriver?

Hah. Try as I might, I can't resist commenting that I read on some BBS .txt file way back in the early '90s that some monks in the Himalayas used to sit in specific positions (in a semicircle or something?) when large rocks needed to be moved. They would chant and drum and the things would be rendered far easier to shift. Specific reference was made to levitation, and the text was from a western observer's account. I'm not a physicist or saying this is true, just that I read the above 20+ years ago and it stuck in my head as an oddity. Reading this article, it came to the fore. Personally I wouldn't be half surprised if eventually it comes out that the careful use of human or percussion-producible frequencies can facilitate a similar effect to that described in this article.