Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018.

Scientists have now used supercomputers to make optical tweezers safer to use on living cells with applications to cancer therapy, environmental monitoring, and more.

“We believe our research is one significant step closer towards the industrialization of optical tweezers in biological applications, specifically in both selective cellular surgery and targeted drug delivery,” said Pavana Kollipara, a recent graduate of The University of Texas at Austin.

Chinese scientists have apparently developed a new kind of magnetized coaxial gun that can generate magnetized plasma rings to move stuff at a distance without physical contact.

Chinese scientists are working on a device that uses plasma rings to move objects at a distance. Touted as possibly being used for contactless satellite recovery, delivery, or space object deflection, the team behind the program is confident the device would work in principle, the South China Morning Post.

Likened to the “Jedi” abilities of ‘Force Push’ and ‘Force Pull’ in the science fiction franchise ‘Star Wars’ (though possibly closer in concept to an actual ‘tractor beam’), the device could prove revolutionary for many industries if proven viable.

Scientists are working on bringing a tractor beam from science fiction to reality. Yes, seriously.

Angel_nt/iStock.

Today we will learn all there is to know about tractor beams’ past, present, and future.

One that manipulates objects and everything.

Scientists how now developed a mini tractor beam that can pull atoms and nanoparticles. Scientists have built a real working tractor beam, albeit at a very small scale. The device, which attracts one object to another from a distance, originates in fiction. The term was coined by E. E. Smith who mentioned the technology in his 1931 novel Spacehounds of IPC, and since the 1990s, researchers have worked to make it a reality.

Tractor beams make intuitive sense. Matter and energy interact with each other in countless ways throughout the Universe. Magnetism and gravity are both natural forces that can draw objects together, so there’s sort of a precedent.

But engineering an actual tractor beam is something different.

Researchers have developed a way to use laser light to pull a macroscopic object. Although microscopic optical tractor beams have been demonstrated before, this is one of the first times that laser pulling has been used on larger objects.

Light contains both energy and momentum that can be used for various types of optical manipulation such as levitation and rotation. Optical tweezers, for example, are commonly used scientific instruments that use laser light to hold and manipulate tiny objects such as atoms or cells. For the last ten years, scientists have been working on a new type of optical manipulation: using laser light to create an optical tractor beam that could pull objects.

“In previous studies, the light pulling force was too small to pull a macroscopical object,” said research team member Lei Wang from QingDao University of Science and Technology in China. “With our new approach, the light pulling force has a much larger amplitude. In fact, it is more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the light pressure used to drive a solar sail, which uses the momentum of photons to exert a small pushing force.”

Circa 2015

Star Trek’s ideal view of medicine is closer than we think.

Researchers manage to build a light beam able to attract and repel particles about 100 times further than has been previously achieved.