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January 28, 2023

⚡ Welcome to The Weekly Authority, the  Android Authority newsletter that breaks down the top Android and tech news from the week. The 229th edition is here with Pixel Tablet Pro leaks, Samsung’s big news ahead of Galaxy Unpacked, a OnePlus tablet, Dead Space reviews, and real-life tractor beams.

đŸ€ź This week, I attempted to eat a pizza that was almost as large as me while watching the second episode of The Last of Us. For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, eating during the show isn’t something I’d recommend!

Popular news this week

Pixel Tablet and dock
Google

Movies/TV

The Last Of Us Easter Egg Google Search
Google

Gaming: 

Game Boy Advance SP with Pokemon
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority

Reviews

An Amazfit Falcon rests on its side, displaying a watch face.
Kaitlyn Cimino / Android Authority

Features

google pixel 7 vs pixel 7 pro in hand
Ryan Haines / Android Authority

Weekly Wonder

It may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but this week scientists actually built the first-ever working tractor beam. What a time to be alive!

  • Tractor beams have existed in the world for some time now, but up until now, they’ve never been able to pull objects actually visible to the naked eye.
  • Microscopic tractor beams (optical tweezers) are commonly used to pull nanoparticles and atoms in research and medicine.
  • However, it’s much more exciting when we can actually see a tractor beam in action.
  • Chinese scientists published a new study in Optic Express, covering their creation of the first tractor beam that can manipulate macroscopic objects, or things we can actually see with the naked eye.
  • Ok, so everything was done in highly controlled lab conditions, with a “rarefied gaseous environment with a lower pressure than Earth’s atmosphere,” — and the object in question that was manipulated was a specific type of Graphene composite.
  • But holy c***, they moved an object with a laser!
  • From the study: “With our new approach, the light pulling force has a much larger amplitude. In fact, it is more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the light pressure used to drive a solar sail, which uses the momentum of photons to exert a small pushing force.”
  • The experiment doesn’t end there, though, and the team of scientists, led by Lei Wang, will continue to push the possibilities.
  • “This work expands the scope of optical pulling from microscale to macroscale, which has great potential in macroscale optical manipulations.”
  • The non-contact and long-distance pulling approach may come in handy for various scientific experiments, according to Wang, and in the future, we could see tractor beams like this used to manipulate vehicles and aircraft on Mars.
  • We may not yet have robots to cook us dinner and flying cars for every household, but this is pretty cool!

Tech Calendar

  • February 1 @ 1 PM ET: Samsung Unpacked (Galaxy S23?)
  • February 7: OnePlus 11 global launch (and OnePlus Buds Pro 2)
  • February 22: PSVR 2 launch date
  • February 27-March 2: MWC 2023 Barcelona

Tech Tweet of the Week

In it for the replies 😂

a member was accused of playing video games on his work computer and I got him cleared by proving conclusively that the employer-provided graphics card couldn’t handle the resource-hungry game his supervisor claimed to have seen https://t.co/FIS5yyIy78
— Erik Strobl đŸŒč 🩝 (@erikstrobl) January 25, 2023

Something extra: Just a kitty enjoying a blow dry, because, aww.

Have a wonderful week!

Paula Beaton, Copy Editor.

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