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Curiosity Weekly

Tractor Beam, Crystal Palace, Botany Dark Spots

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Self-improvement, Science, Astronomy, Education

4.6 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, you’ll learn about the tiny tractor beam that could change how certain diseases are diagnosed, how a screw allowed an iconic historical building to go up faster than anyone thought possible, and why scientists are worried about the 33 dark spots with thousands of unknown plants. 

 

Tractor Beam 

 

  • “MIT engineers create a chip-based tractor beam for biological particles.” by Adam Zewe. 2024.  
  • “Optical tweezing of microparticles and cells using silicon-photonics-based optical phased arrays.” by Tal Sneh, et al. 2024.  

 

Crystal Palace 

 

 

Botany Dark Spots 

 

 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

No home. No address. No address. No bank account. No bank account. No job. No job. No home. No address. No bank account. No job. No bank account. No job. No home. It's time to break the vicious circle. We're working with charities like

0:23.5

Shelter to provide a bank account for people who are homeless. Search HSBCUK, no fixed address.

0:36.4

Welcome to Curiosity Daily from Discovery, a great place to get smarter without taking up your whole day.

0:42.6

I'm Nate.

0:43.2

Hi guys, I'm Callie. We have some amazing stories to talk about today. Nate's going to tell you about them.

0:47.7

Today you'll learn about the tiny tractor beam that could change how certain diseases are diagnosed,

0:52.2

how a screw allowed an iconic historical building to go faster than anyone thought possible,

0:57.0

and why scientists are worried about 33 dark spots with thousands of unknown plants.

1:02.6

Okay, these are going to be fun.

1:04.4

Engineers at MIT have built a tiny tractor beam on a chip that can capture and manipulate biological particles like cells.

1:11.6

Okay.

1:12.5

I mean, that's a lot too.

1:14.8

Tractor beams that can capture cells.

1:17.9

Kind of sounds like the premise of, you know, maybe a sci-fi movie.

1:21.6

Okay, so this definitely has a sci-fi edge to it, but it solves a pretty interesting problem.

1:25.7

So before I get to this tractor beam on a chip,

1:28.4

I should say that this is a type of tech that actually already exists called optical tweezers.

1:33.6

I'm guessing optical tweezers aren't tiny tweezers that you use on your eyes?

1:38.6

See, this is how I know you've never used a pair of tweezers. You don't use them on your eyes.

1:42.7

I browse, maybe, but... Optical ones? Sure. So traditional optical tweezers. You don't use them on your eyes. I browse, maybe, but...

1:44.5

Optical ones? Sure. So, traditional optical tweezers are big, bulky devices used in specialized labs

1:51.1

that use photons of light to manipulate particles that are close to the light source or directly

...

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