The tubes of the Internet saw some extra traffic recently when NASA announced funding for a team of researchers to study tractor beams. That’s right, tractor beams, as in Star Trek and Star Wars (and countless other science fiction settings). The goal here isn’t to grab spacecraft (at least, not at first); instead, NASA wants to use the technology to collect particle samples for analysis on rovers and spacecraft.

This may sound like science fiction, but a few days after this announcement, a pair of papers appeared in Physical Review Letters, discussing the theory behind two approaches the NASA team plans to study (the papers' authors appear to be unaffiliated with that team).

Read the comments on this post