Leave it to the Scots to create a practical working tractor beam.
From an article recently in The New Yorker: 'An Advance In Tractor-Beam Technology'..
"What we've shown in our tractor-beam experiment is that it may be possible to push, drag, or hold the drug capsules at a specific location in the body, improving the targeting of the released drugs,"Démoré told me.
And if Dundee's device could be made to work on larger objects, it could also prove useful for collecting geological samples from parts of the planet currently impossible to reach—volcanic vents, the deep sea, perhaps even space. "Some of this may be a fair way off," Démoré said. "But we've demonstrated the physics that make it conceivable."
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/scottish-tractor-beam (http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/scottish-tractor-beam)