Electrical properties of glass at the nanoscale lead to a pump the size of a red blood cell

Researchers have devised a way to fabricate tiny electrodes from glass, harnessing a phenomenon by which nanoscale glass walls can be transformed from insulators to conductors and back again. At larger scales, that phenomenon, known as  dielectric breakdown , leads to excess heating and structural damage,  but at the nanoscale the process appears to be harmless and  reversible.