Earlier this year, Francesco Stellacci announced that his group had developed a material that can suck 20 times its weight in oil out of a sample of water. The material could be used to clean up massive crude spills, and chemist Joerg Lahann of the University of Michigan called the work a blueprint for scientists who hope to design nanomaterials that protect the environment. Yet Stellacci doesn’t consider this his best work. He’s excited about tricking cells.

“Cancer treatments have hit a wall,” says chemist Michael J. Sailor of the University of California at San Diego. Today’s chemotherapy drugs leave the body too quickly, and both chemo and radiation kill healthy cells indiscriminately, he explains. So he has developed “nanoworms,” strings of iron-oxide particles that could swim through your blood to kill nascent cancerous tumors—and nothing else.

Catching cancer before it metastasizes, or spreads throughout the body, is one way to increase your chances of survival. Now scientists may have found a way to help even when cancer is already on the move, by using magnets to lasso cancer cells and drag them out of the body. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown that magnetic nanoparticles—tiny shards of magnetic metal, less than a hundred thousandths of an inch in diameter—can be attached to cancer cells, which can then be manipulated and moved with another magnet.

For years scientists have been touting a disease-fighting technique called RNA interference. The idea behind it is pretty simple: By piggybacking on the body's own system for silencing genes, researchers think they could stop troublesome proteins from being produced, and, as a result, halt the damage those proteins cause. The trick, though, is that scientists have had a hard time figuring out how to make RNAi, as it's known, work on specific tissues.

It's about time someone recognized ivy's ability to stick to walls, especially with geckos getting all the headlines lately. You had to figure that at some point a few scientists were going to sit down and start figuring out how to transfer ivy's sticky technique to man-made materials. Now researchers from the University of Tennessee and Agilent Labs have determined that ivy actually secretes tiny nanoparticles to bind to surfaces.

Nanotech expert James Baker of the University of Michigan is now turning his attention to the battlefield, hoping that tiny drug-carrying particles could one day help injured soldiers. Baker, who has also been exploring the use of nanoparticles as diagnostic tools for astronauts on missions to Mars, thinks nanotech could be used to deliver painkillers to injured troops as they wait for medical attention.

Morphine, one of the military's preferred painkillers today, is far from ideal because trained medical personnel need to administer it - the soldier, or someone in his group, can't just give it to himself. What Baker envisions is a pen-like device that a soldier would use to inject a stream of drug-bearing nanoparticles into an injured area. The nanoparticles might deliver a slow release of morphine, keeping the soldier comfortable and stable until he or she gets proper care. But it would also be able to counteract one of the dangerous side effects of morphine, the suppression of regular breathing. If necessary, the particles would release a drug that fights these negative effects, keeping the soldier stable. For now the work will be limited to lab studies, but it could be tested in animals before too long.—Gregory Mone