This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

You probably don't think of scientific or medical instruments

as the kind of instruments that actually make music, but now researchers have built a scientific

instrument specifically designed to detect counterfeit medications through sound.

Someone even made the comparison that we're making a scale in the sense that it measures mass, you know, but it also plays scales in the sense that it makes musical notes.

William Grover, a bioengineerer at UC Riverside.

He and his team took inspiration from the African musical instrument called the

Ambira. It has metal tines which resonate over a small wooden board when you

pluck them.

Instead of Tines, Grover's instrument uses a hollow metal tube.

Just load a sample of medication inside and it changes the tone of the instrument.

And so a sample that's more dense creates a... and it's

and it changes the tone of the instrument.

And so a sample that's more dense creates a lower note.

A sample that's less dense creates a higher note in terms of pitch.

For example, here's the tube with air inside.

Here it is again with water inside. It's denser so the pitch is lower. The World Health Organization reckons about 10% of the medications in low and middle income countries are fakes.

Sometimes, dangerous ones.

So the idea here is to fill the tube with a sample that's known to be safe, like cough syrup from a reputable

source, and then compare it to a bottle you're not so sure about.

Now if you get the same pitch out of those two samples, it's very good evidence that they are probably the same material

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