Ultrasound scans have changed the nature of pregnancy, allowing doting parents-to-be to carry pictures of their unborn babies in their wallets. But the possibilities of ultrasound don’t end there: inventors are finding ever more diverse uses for it.
MIT, for instance, is now using ultrasound to get large doses of drugs through the tough outer layers of skin and deep into flesh without injections (US patent filing 2004/0210184).
Ultrasound just above 20 kilohertz can improve fluid absorption through the pores, but prolonged exposure to the acoustic energy can burn. However, Joseph Kost and colleagues at MIT found that by…
