Little things, like taking a shortcut through the park on your way to work each day can make a big difference

to your mental health. Find your little big thing

little big thing at every mind matters. This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Waite Gibbs.

Imagine getting screened for early stage lung cancer simply by taking a deep breath from an inhaler and then peeing into a cup.

Sengita Batcha, a professor of health sciences and engineering at MIT, described how that might be possible in a TED Talk

she gave in 2016.

What if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself, and send a signal

to the outside world.

It sounds a little bit like science fiction, but actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that.

Batchia's idea was to invent non-toxic nanoprobes that doctors could put inside your blood or lungs or gut to detect tiny tumors when they're easier to treat

before they grow big enough to spread throughout the body and damage vital organs.

I dream that one day instead of going into an expensive screening facility

to get a colonoscopy or a mammogram or a pap smear,

that you could get a shot, wait an hour

and do a urine test on a paper strip.

In 2017, Bhatia's team reported a proof of concept experiment in nature

biomedical engineering that demonstrated nanoprobes like this, working to detect

early-stage ovarian cancer in mice.

And now the group has refined this technology further to create a screening test for lung cancer that is more sensitive

than the CT scans used today. The team of Harvard and MIT researchers

described their work in the April 1st issue of science translational medicine.

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