One of Yahoo's featured news stories this afternoon focuses on a nifty discovery out of the Stanford chemistry department:
By using a laser light, an infrared camera, and extremely tiny particles [called carbon nanotubes] the Stanford researchers developed a way to look deeply and with greater clarity into the workings of a living, breathing body.
...
"You have the lungs, and the kidneys and then kind of a glowing signal from all over the mouse as the nano tubes go to internal organs and start flowing through the blood," says [researcher Sarah Sherlock].
Using special software the scientists then came up with a revealing anatomical map.
"We were able to even distinguish organs that you couldn't normally be able to distinguish like the pancreas," says Sherlock.
The researchers, led by Hongjie Dai, PhD, say the technology might someday be used to better track the effectiveness of cancer drugs. Their findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
