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."

From the Description...

[Philomage]

They should call this an optical pipette. (Yes, I did RTFA, and no, I'm not turning in my nerd card.)

Not Really a Tractor Beam...

[Richard.Tao]

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.

Too late

[CarpetShark]

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?!

Pressor beam anyhow.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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".