Tiny bubbles destroy cancer cells.

From LiveScience:

Tiny bubbles can pack quite a punch — creating nanoscale explosions that destroy cancer cells.

Using lasers and nanoparticles, scientists discovered a new technique for singling out individual diseased cells and demolishing them.

The scientists used lasers to make "nanobubbles" by zapping gold nanoparticles inside cells. In tests on cancer cells, they found they could tune the lasers to create either small, bright bubbles that were visible but harmless or large bubbles that burst the cells.

The term "nano" generally refers to stuff at the nanoscale that's no larger than 100 nanometers, where 1 nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. For comparison, a hair is about 100,000 nm wide.

"Single-cell targeting is one of the most touted advantages of nanomedicine, and our approach delivers on that promise with a localized effect inside an individual cell," said study author Dmitri Lapotko, a physicist at Rice University in Texas. "The idea is to spot and treat unhealthy cells early, before a disease progresses to the point of making people extremely ill."