(Photo: Dvice)

Advanced 3D printing technology is getting close to resembling replicators from Star Trek and iPads look a whole lot like the gadgets Geordi was always carrying around. Now, physicists have taken another step towards making Starfleet technology a reality by inventing a working tractor beam, which is essentially a laser that can move things. Sure, currently it can only move itty bitty molecules, but the fact that it works at all opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities.

NYU professors David Ruffner and David Grier have developed a way to harness Bessel beams in order to pull particles towards a laser source. The result is the beginnings of a very tiny tractor beam capable of moving silica spheres suspended in water.

According to Geekosystem:

Rather than a single beam, Bessel beams are transmitted as concentric circles that converge around the point they’re directed at. This gives the beams a unique quality. If you place a small object between the source of the beam and its destination, the concentric rings of the Bessel beam can reform around the object. That makes it possible for Bessel beams to pull or push objects — a quality of the beams that had been hypothetical until now.

Mr. Ruffner and Mr. Grier discovered that by overlapping two Bessel beams and slightly distorting them through a lens they could create enough energy to move the molecules.

Phys Org, which originally posted the discovery, argues that this type of tractor beam would need such a hulking amount of energy in order to allow it to move large objects that it "likely would destroy those objects in the process." But, they add, "it does suggest that such a device might be possible using another less energy intensive source."

In Star Trek, tractor beams are used to manipulate cargo, guide ships into the landing dock and damage enemy ships. In real life, we just hope we'll be able to shine a laser on the TV remote across the room and have it magically float over to us. Dream big.

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Team GhostShell returned late Monday with Project WestWind: a leak of 120,000 records from 100 major universities around the world.

Team GhostShell is the hacking group behind Project Hellfire, which launched in August this year. Project Hellfire lifted 1 million accounts from 100 websites around the world, compromising data from the CIA and from Wall Street.

The hacked data leaked in Project WestWind does indeed appear to come from a who's who of major learning institutions. They include Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Tokyo University, Cornell and New York University.

In their Pastebin announcement, Team GhostShell said Project WestWind was a serious effort to jump-start a dialogue on the state of higher education today. Apparently this hack wasn't pranksterism for the lulz, but hacktivism for the greater good:

We wanted to bring to your attention different examples from Europe, how the laws change so often that even the teachers have a hard time adjusting to them, let alone, the students, to the US, where tuition fees have spiked up so much that by the time you finish any sort of degree, you will be in more debt than you can handle and with no certainty that you will get a job, to Asia, where strict & limited teachings still persist and never seem to catch up with the times and most of the time fail to prep you up for a world where foreign affairs are crucial in this day and age.

The hackers ask that others use the information as a conversation starter, team member DeadMellox writing:

You don't have to talk about it with us, what's important is that you bring up the subject 'today's education' in day-to-day conversations with your family, friends, people close to you and try to understand the system better, together. How it works, how a certain type of diploma can or cannot help you in your road to the career you want to pursue.

Though Team GhostShell's data dump contains user screen names and mostly hashed passwords (Betabeat examined one file in which some of the passwords were apparently cracked), they claim they've kept the leaked records to a minimum.

Team GhostShell issued a warning to the targeted institutions regarding the states of their networks: "When we got there, we found out that a lot of them have malware injected. No surprise there since some have credit card information stored."

Betabeat has reached out to a web network administrator at one of the hacked universities for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.

We were immediately intrigued by AllThingsD's story about enterprising NYU senior John Mardini's new startup, Voyager Mobile. For one, Mr. Mardini wants to open cheap cellphone services to the public via the suddenly-popular process of reselling service on another carrier's network.

For $19 a month, reported CNET, Voyager would give users unlimited text and calling on last year's models of prepaid mobile phones. For $39 a month, you could get unlimited data, talk and text. As a mobile virtual network operator or MVNO, Voyager does this by spreading "its service across Sprint's wireless backbone."

And then there was the quote Mr.Mardini, who hails from Knoxville, gave AllThingsD:

“It was just one of those things,” Mardini said in a telephone interview. “I pay so much for my cell phone. I was thinking there has to be a better way to make it cheaper for everyone.”

And here we thought NYU's spendthrift student body had never even saw the inside of their cellphone bill!

Earlier reports promised more details at 6am today via the Voyager Mobile website, which even featured a countdown clock.

Unfortunately, a visit to the site this morning yielded some bad news:

During its Tuesday, May 15 launch, Voyager Mobile experienced a malicious network attack to its primary website: voyagermobile.com. Due to the network outage, Voyager Mobile is postponing its launch to a time and date in the very near future.

Our goal of low cost wireless service for all will not be undermined and we strive to continue the voyage for a better wireless world.

We've reached out to Mr. Mardini for more information. But think about it this way: If it was worth it for some troll to mess with your launch, you're probably onto something.