If you’re an Old Trekkie like me, this will be interesting. MIT has created a chip-based optical tractor beam that can focus a penetrating beam of light over 5 millimeters away from the surface of the chip itself. That might not sound like much, but it's a game-changer compared to previous integrated "optical tweezers" that could only work within a few microns of the chip. Those older approaches had to remove cells from their sterile glass containers (commonly used for biological experiments)
