Grapefruits have long been known for their health benefits, and the subtropical fruit may revolutionize how medical therapies like anti-cancer drugs are delivered to specific tumour cells. Scientists have discovered how to use grapefruit to develop medicine.

Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers.

Imagine a bendable tablet computer or an electronic newspaper that could fold to fit in a pocket.

Meeting the demand for more data storage in smaller volumes means using materials made up of ever-smaller magnets, or nanomagnets. One promising material for a potential new generation of recording media is an alloy of iron and platinum with an ordered crystal structure. Researchers have now found a convenient way to make these alloys and tailor their properties.

These days, aerospace engineering is all about the light stuff: building airplanes with lighter wings, fuselage and landing gear in an effort to reduce fuel costs. Advanced carbon-fibre composites have been used in recent years to lighten planes’ loads. These materials can match aluminum and titanium in strength but at a fraction of the weight, and can be found in aircraft like the Boeing 787 and Airbus A380, reducing such jets’ weight by 20 per cent.

Physicists may have created the smallest drops of liquid ever made in the lab. That possibility has been raised by the results of a recent experiment conducted by physicist Julia Velkovska and her colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider located at the European Laboratory for Nuclear and Particle Physics (CERN) in Switzerland.

Engineers combine layers of flexible materials into pressure sensors to create a wearable heart monitor thinner than a dollar bill. The skin-like device could one day provide doctors with a safer way to check the condition of a patient's heart.

There is an urgent need to find new antibiotics as bacteria are constantly evolving and steadily becoming resistant to the current arsenal used by doctors around the world. A key question is whether it is possible to create better anti-infective agents using design principles rather than by trial and error. Antimicrobial peptides are short protein fragments that have been suggested as such future alternatives to current antibiotics. They identify bacteria and disrupt their membrane structure, thus ultimately killing the bacteria.

Investigating the friction behavior of nanosystems, scientists have discovered a previously unknown type of friction that sheds new light on some previously unexplainable phenomena.

Researchers have reported that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors. Synthetic silicates are made up of simple or complex salts of silicic acids, and have been used extensively for various commercial and industrial applications, such as food additives, glass and ceramic filler materials, and anti-caking agents.