'Tractor Beam' One Step Closer To Reality: Laser Moves Small Particles

Members of the scientific team: Yana Izdebskaya, Anton Desyatnikov, Vladlen Shvedov, Andrei Rode, Yuri Kivshar and Wieslaw Krolikowski. (Credit: Photo by Tim Wetherell)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 9, 2010) — Researchers from The Australian National University have developed the ability to move particles over large distances, using a specially designed laser beam.

Professor Andrei Rode's team from the Laser Physics Centre at ANU have developed a laser beam that can move very small particles up to distances of a metre and a half using only the power of light.

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Scientists Invent A Tractor Beam

In "Stak Trek," Federation starships relied upon tractor beams to hold and tow other vessels. Scientists may not be there yet, but they have managed to tow a small particle using light beams

From FOX News:

WASHINGTON – Tractor beams, energy rays that can move objects, are a science fiction mainstay. But now they are becoming a reality -- at least for moving very tiny objects.

Researchers from the Australian National University have announced that they have built a device that can move small particles a meter and a half using only the power of light.

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Fringe's Killer Biological Weapon Is Rooted in Fact

From Popular Mechanics:

Last week, a lethal virus unleashed in an office building caused us to rethink what would happen in the midst of a real outbreak. In Jan. 29's episode, "The Bishop Revival," the cast of Fringe encounters its most plausible case yet. We talk to toxin expert professor Dale Johnson of UC Berkley's Nutritional Science and Toxicology program to determine if a chemical weapon can be designed to target those with specific genetic traits.

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Mysterious Radiation May Strike Airline Passengers

There's a small chance that passengers aboard an airplane flying through a storm may be exposed to high levels of radiation, new research suggests. Credit: Stockxpert

From Live Science:

Airline passengers flying through storms might have more to worry about than a little turbulence. A new study suggests that if jets pass near lightning discharges or related phenomena known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, passengers and crew members could be exposed to harmful levels of radiation, a dose equal to that of 400 chest X-rays.

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Investigator Checks Out Haunted House For Sale

A haunted house in Cuchillo, New Mexico, being sold on eBay. Credit: Benjamin Radford

From Live Science:

There is no shortage of people seeking to turn ghosts into gold and spooks into silver. Hundreds of amateur ghost-hunting groups across the country offer tours of local haunts, allegedly spirit-infested hotels, mansions, cemeteries, and so on.

Ghosts generate a lot of green.

One of the most enterprising ghost entrepreneurs is an artist named Josh Bond, who lives in the tiny New Mexican town of Cuchillo. Bond is offering a genuine haunted house for sale — on eBay.

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Do Dinosaurs Still Exist?

Conan Doyle's "Lost World," near Angel Falls in the jungles of Venezuela, in a 2007 photo. It was his visit to this area that inspired him to write about the idea that dinosaurs may still exist in places like this. Credit: Benjamin Radford

From Live Science:

The idea of still-living dinosaurs has captured the public imagination for well over a century.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, published a 1912 novel called "The Lost World," set in the remote Venezuelan jungle where dinosaurs still survive in modern times. Films such as "Jurassic Park" and "Land of the Lost," which opens Friday, were inspired by Conan Doyle's vision — in fact the sequel to "Jurassic Park" was titled "The Lost World."

The animated film "Up" (currently No. 1 at the box office) also takes place in this lost world, the plot involving the discovery of an unknown, multicolored dinosaur.

For most of us, fiction is good enough. Yet some believe that giant dinosaurs still exist today, just beyond the reach of scientific proof.

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Fringe Season Finale Flirts With Theoretical Physics

From Popular Mechanics:

During the course of its first season, Fringe has played with the idea of that there are actually two realities, one slightly different from the other. In the season finale, "There's More Than One of Everything," the show delved into the science behind this idea, fleshing out the alternate reality with FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and company trying to stop über-villain David Robert Jones from getting to the elusive Massive Dynamic CEO William Bell, who, according to spokeswoman Nina Sharp, is hiding out in this other reality. PM spoke to physicist Michio Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible, to perform our final fact check of Fringe, season one.

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Is Fringe's Genetic Monster Possible?

(Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn/FOX)

From Popular Mechanics:

In last night's episode of Fringe, "Unleashed," a genetically generated monster terrorizes Boston—and mad scientist Walter Bishop, son Peter and FBI agent Olivia Dunham must find the transgenic animal, a gila monster-wasp-bat hybrid that activists had let loose from an animal testing facility. The creature—which had physical characteristics of all the animals it was spliced together from—mostly kills people with its massive claws and prodigious fangs, but its real drive is to infect people with its larvae to create more monsters. PM spoke with geneticists to find out just how close science is to creating a Fringe-style supermonster.

When a car-full of dead college students—their bodies mangled by an animal "not indigenous to the area," according to the local coroner—it's not long before Walter pinpoints a transgenic animal as the culprit. "It's an animal creation, an organism made up of the genes of many species," he explains. "It's accelerated Darwinism!" Bishop, of course, had worked on such animals during his heyday, but none of his creations had survived. "It's possible, in theory," he says. "You would have to solve many problems," like stopping gene rejection similar to what people experience when their bodies reject donor organs.

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Could Someone Really Teleport Out of Jail?: Fringe Fact vs. Fiction

From Popular Mechanics:

David Robert Jones is back causing mayhem. In last night's episode of Fringe, "Ability," the villainous mystery man tries to kill with an affliction that causes hyperactive scar tissue, which closes all the victim's orifices, so they can't breathe. But to execute his murderous plan, he needs to first spring himself from a German prison using a fantastically sci-fi weapon (a stolen design from our mad scientist, Walter Bishop): a disintegration-reintegration ray. This scenario may be equal to the standard of truth-stretching that we know and love in Fringe—neither Mr. Jones nor any other person will be teleported from place to place anytime soon. But there is a bizarre real-life analogue for this Star Trek tech. Just as when bank robbers walked through walls in "Safe," four episodes ago, Fringe borrows from weird phenomena that actually happen at the quantum level. Then, it was quantum tunneling, but this week it's something just as odd: quantum teleportation.

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Fringe Fact v. Fiction: Could Your Brain Actually Turn to Goo?

From Popular Mechanics:

In its 12th episode, Fringe brought back one of the all-time greatest, grossest sci-fi horrors: Liquefied brains.

While investigating a string of murders, the agents find viscous liquid oozing from victims' orifices–something has turned their brains into nothing but goo. Sure enough, drilling a hole into a victim sends brown goo, all that's remaining of his brain, dripping out of his skull. "The brain goo that they made is maybe the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," Fringe star Joshua Jackson said in a promo for last night's episode, "The No-Brainer." But is the brain science as far off the mark as it has been in past episodes?

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Science Closing In On Cloak Of Invisibility

From Breitbart/AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) - They can't match Harry Potter yet, but scientists are moving closer to creating a real cloak of invisibility.

Researchers at Duke University, who developed a material that can "cloak" an item from detection by microwaves, report that they have expanded the number of wavelengths they can block.

Last August the team reported they had developed so-called metamaterials that could deflect microwaves around a three-dimensional object, essentially making it invisible to the waves.

The system works like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky.

The researchers report in Thursday's edition of the journal Science that they have developed a series of mathematical commands to guide the development of more types of metamaterials to cloak objects from an increasing range of electromagnetic waves.

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Most Extreme News Stories Of 2008

From New Scientist:

It's been a year of extremes for science and technology. From camera footage of the deepest living fish, swimming some 5 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean, to the creation of the smoothest ever surface - a lead and silicon film.

Here are eight more extremes that New Scientist brought you in 2008.

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Fringe Pushes Probability To The Limit As Characters Walk Through Walls

(Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn/FOX)

From Popular Mechanics:

Fringe's 10th episode, "Safe," opens with a team of burglars who rob banks without the tedious trouble of picking locks. Instead, the intrepid thieves change the molecular structure of the wall allowing them to pass through the wall. Unfortunately, one member doesn't make it out in time and the wall resolidifies around him. The next day the Fringe team shows up to find a dead man stuck inside a wall. We talked to experts about the real quantum mechanical phenomenon of tunneling to find out just how unlikely the scenario is.

Can people walk through walls?
Fringe loves to toe the line between science fact and fiction, but this time its tilted far over onto the fiction side. In the episode, mad scientist Walter Bishop concludes that the thieves would've needed cutting-edge knowledge of quantum physics, plus more money than many banks' assets combined, to make it through the wall. However, the closest thing to a scientific explanation Bishop offers is a lab demonstration with rice—when he puts an action figure on top of a bowl of uncooked rice, it can stand on top, but when he shakes the back it sinks to the bottom.

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Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

Experimental set-up to induce illusory ownership of an artificial body (left panel). The participant could see the mannequin's body from the perspective of the mannequin's head (right panel). Credit: Valeria Petkova, H. Henrik Ehrsson, PLoS ONE

From Live Science:

Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a "humanoid body," experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other's body.

The bizarre achievement hearkens to body swaps portrayed on numerous TV shows and movies such as "Freaky Friday" and "All of Me."

In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.

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