In the ongoing search for better ways to target anticancer drugs to kill tumours without making people sick, researchers find that nanoparticles called buckyballs might be used to significantly boost the payload of drugs carried by tumour-targeting antibodies.

In research due to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Chemical Communications, scientists at Rice University and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center describe a method for creating a new class of anti-cancer compounds that contain both tumour-targetting antibodies and nanoparticles called buckyballs. Buckyballs are soccer ball-shaped molecules of pure carbon that can each be loaded with several molecules of anticancer drugs like Taxol^®.

Too much sun—for plants as well as people—can be harmful to long-term health. But to avoid the botanical equivalent of “lobster tans”, plants have developed an intricate internal defense mechanism, called photoprotection, which acts like sunscreen to ward off the sun’s harmful rays.

“We knew that biomolecules called carotenoids participate in this process of photoprotection, but the question has been, how does this work?” said Iris Visoly-Fisher, a postdoctoral research associate in the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University.

The University of Bath is to lead an international £555,000 three-year project to develop a system which could cut out the need for wiring to carry electric currents in silicon chips. Computers double in power every 18 months or so as scientists and engineers develop ways to make silicon chips smaller. But in the next few years they will hit a limit imposed by the need to use electric wiring, which weakens signals sent between computer components at high speed.

The University of Leicester is the co-ordinating partner in an international project involving information that can be stored on nanoparticles. The project, entitled Nanospin, aims to use the novel properties of nanoparticles in the building of new materials and devices and, looking even further ahead, to functionalise the nanoparticles themselves, by making them from more than one element, or as core-shell structures, so that each is able to become a device.