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Tractor Beams Come To Life
Jamie is helping bring our childhood fantasies/nightmares to life with a link that says "Andrei Rhode, a researcher involved with the project, said that existing optical tweezers are able to move particles the size of a bacterium a few millimeters in a liquid. Their
new technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of a meter or more."
Until the bacterium reroute the main power conduits through the deflector beam to create an inverse tachyon pulse. Then what?
For some reason I thought of farm implements when I saw "tractor." Didn't make a whole lot of sense.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
can't quite figure out why?
It seems like this tech would be useful for assembling circuits or computer chips.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
should be renamed to "NO Technology" because
the marketeers are abusing subatomic forces.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout .
the tractor beam wont be installed until Tuesday.
Tractor beams attract. A flashlight has more in common with a light saber, than this has with a tractor beam.
Enough with the sensationalism, already. Leave that to the CNNs and Fox News's.. If you don't understand the science in an article, consider waiting for someone smarter than you to post it.
News for mooncalves. Stuff thats way the fsck beyond your meager comprehension.
Sure moving objects with light is cool, but this is pushing, not pulling.
This tech will do no good in keeping those pesky rebels from escaping your space station.
As stated by the commenter in the article, don't tractor beams pull in most sci-fi stories? Pushing and pulling are two different things.
Nothing close to a tractor beam, as it requires using the properties of heating air to actually move things suspended in the air. A new age fan (http://www.dyson.com/fans/) will do just as good of a job.
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with the research. It is simply not a tractor beam, or even the beginnings of one.
What?!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
They should call this an optical pipette. (Yes, I did RTFA, and no, I'm not turning in my nerd card.)
Physicists have been able to manipulate tiny particles over miniscule distances by using lasers for years.
I hope the new tractor beams don't take as long to operate. I don't have that kind of time.
My webcomic
As if our country isn't obese enough already. Now we'll eventually have people getting beer and Doritos without even getting their fat asses off the couch.
Wouldn't work in space then I guess. Good luck Deathstart/ID4 motherships - Millenium Falcon and are off for a spin... see ya!
- "Han, V2.0 is out."
- "Shit, Marching into the detention area is not what I had in mind"...
From the article "Because this technique needs heated gas to push the particles around, it can't work in the vacuum of outer space like the tractor beams in Star Trek."
Also it needs lasers on both sides of the object and "tiny glass particles" near the object.This technique can in no way mimic the properties of what I consider a tractor bream: a beam of energy that pulls and object toward it. It's just a better way at moving stuff with light, which is still nifty.
Just reverse it -- use dark instead of light -- and it will pull.
So, they're using tractors to harvest beans. So what?
Step 1: Point tractor beam to your wee-wee (only if you have erectile dificulties and don't feel like taking viagra anymore)
Step 2: Turn on tractor beam
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Meh. Can't use it to snag passing Klingon battlecruisers.
Until someone finds a way of using this for porn, its developement will be slow. Star Trek devices may sound cool, but the Internet didn't explode until someone found a way to distribute naughty pictures with it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
You mean like this?
They should be researching finding a replacement for fossil fuels
*ANOTHER* horribly erroneous SlashDot article title.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The laser cone is used to stabalize the item. Suppose the laser cone is mounted on a turret and shifts angles, effectively moving the item not just toward or away, but from left/right or up/down. If they start accelerating slowly, and then suddenly stop moving the turret, users could 'fling' material with these laser beams. If they stopped suddenly, I'd imagine that the laser cone couldn't contain the velocity of the item, and it would fling in the direction that it was heading.
DIY laser enthusiasts are already doing this with very light smoke particles. This is using 100mw home built hobbyist lasers from used CD drives, etc.
http://laserpointerforums.com/f50/optical-trapping-real-laser-tractor-beams-45954.html
From the article:
"Because this technique needs heated gas to push the particles around, it can't work in the vacuum of outer space like the tractor beams in Star Trek. "
I wonder if they could use this to produce mid air holograms? If they can suspend a single particle and have it glowing like that, then on a larger scale with multiple glowing particles you could build a 3D image without the need of a diffraction medium or vapour as with current mid air displays. Depending on the speed the particles can be manipulated, they could maybe even act as scan line dots.
all you need to do is fire a high intensity broadband stream of electrons at something and it will gradually move as there's no friction in space and also obviously no gravity
Listen, no one's left to care about bacteria. By the time the tractor beam has come to life, even the captain has already abandoned ship.
I mean, seriously... even in the wildest sci-fi show, did you EVER hear of a tractor beam COMING TO LIFE?!
I once had a tractor and on foggy nights I would turn on the lights on the tractor. They would shine through the fog and create a beam of light. Prior Art can't patent!
tractor beams attract things... pressor beams push on things...
Well known in science fiction literature since the early 1930s or so, I think.
I guess if you are a Tom Swift Jr. fan you'd want to call it a repellatron. As featured in "Tom Swift Jr. and his Repellatron Skyway" for example.
Heh.
"Tiny bacterium" is a long way from the heavy couch that we want to effortlessly put in our moving truck.
How many orders of magnitude in size, volume and weight are we talking about? To be useful, it has to go from pico-grams or whatever bacteria weigh, to actual dozens of pounds.
So, now that the hard part (discovery) is out of the way, this tech better advance at moore's law pace, or it will take hundreds of years to move book-sized things. Worse yet, it may turn into near-vaporware, like our other pet projects: airborne energy harnessing, commercial quantum cryptography and any form of non-microscopic quantum teleportation.
Did you just post Anon and mod yourself up?
If you use a high numerical aperture beam, by changing the focal position, you can move a bead in three dimensions, including towards the laser itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers
But can you move the soul?
when I can shoot things with lasers while plowing my field~
\
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For some reason I thought of farm implements when I saw "tractor." Didn't make a whole lot of sense.
Sure it does. "Tractor beams" and "tractors" are named that because they pull. (Same root as "traction".)
However the beam in TFA is, in the science fiction vernacular, a "pressor beam", the "tractor beam"'s other-direction counterpart, because it pushes. The hollow cylindrical beam pushes inward, while the beam-down-the-middle pushes along the "tube".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Tractor beams.
Light Sabers.
Ray guns (not laser guns, but when are they getting upgraded?)
Flying cars (not these toys)
Supersonic (super-hydronic?) submarines.
$10 laptops.
Cheep mylar high-def, color screens that roll up like scrolls.
Fuel Cells.
Power for internal silicon from the blood stream.
How many times do we have to SEE such things advertised "now available" that never come to fruition?
I mean really. I've been seeing "cheap, rollup displays" announced about every year since 1996. When do they actually GET here, or should we just stop listening?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
It is the heated air near the laser beams that moves the particle around, so this would be no use as a tractor beam in space, alas.
Are they related to midiclorians? If so, I think I figured out why this really worked... it wasn't the tools the scientists were using, the bacterium were moving *themselves*! :-O
ad astra per alia porci
You left spacelab without a tweezer beam!? Let me guess, it will be installed on Tuesday?