Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Get your technobabble right, you need to reverse the polarity on the technobabble generator.
*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....
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
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.
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?!
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.
Did you just post Anon and mod yourself up?
when I can shoot things with lasers while plowing my field~
\
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is real, not magic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Come on. If they can't even be honest about not having a tractor beam, how are they going to resist lying about oil?
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
And the Klingons will hold still for that? I don't think so!
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.
Tractor beams, but the implement is being dragged though the dirt and is in a sullen mood.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
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