Nanobubbles
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Researchers use ultrasound to activate cancer-killing drugs
Since your liver is surrounded by delicate blood vessels and bile ducts, cancers are tough to treat with toxic chemotherapy drugs and usually require surgery. However, researchers from the University of Illinois have pioneered a new "triple attack" treatment that kills cancer cells with a standard lymphoma chemo drug. "Nanobubbles" of it are injected into a cancer mass, then "popped" using ultrasound, releasing medicine directly into cancer cells during critical cell formation. "The probability of its undesired systemic release is minimal due to this highly selective activation mechanism, which helps to spare the healthy cells," says lead researcher Dipanjan Pan.
Strained graphene leads to pseudo-magnetic fields, bends physics even further
Man, if only this had been discovered before Ariadne was tasked with building impossible dreams. A team of scientists caught high-fiving over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have a new and riveting announcement to share, and it revolves around our old and trusted friend, graphene. This go 'round, the self-proclaimed "extraordinary form of carbon" is being stressed to its max, but not without good reason. Thanks to inquisitive minds and a "stroke of serendipity," a research team was able to create magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla by simply straining graphene in a certain way. For physicists, the discovery is a dream come true, particularly when you realize that magnetic fields in excess of 85 tesla were practically impossible to come across in a laboratory setting. The benefits here? It's honestly too early to tell, but gurus in the field are already suggesting that the "opportunities for basic science with strain engineering [are] huge." Something tells us Magneto would concur.
