An artist's rendering shows a needle-like carbon nanotube delivering DNA through the wall of a plant cell. It also may be possible to use this method to inject a gene editing tool called CRISPR to alter a plant's characteristics for breeding. Courtesy of Markita del Carpio Landry hide caption
A team of researchers in Boston has developed an insulin-delivery system that injects the medicine directly into the stomach wall, which is painless. Felice Frankel/MIT hide caption
As a child on a New York farm, Eben Bayer helped his dad shovel wood chips in the barn. That's where he noticed a stretchy web of fungus that became the basis of his biodegradable packing material. NPR hide caption
A cubesat, like this briefcase-sized MarCO, was key to relaying telemetry during the recent InSight mission to Mars. It was the first time this kind of mini-spacecraft had flown into deep space. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Ayanna Howard, a roboticist at Georgia Tech, was always interested in building robots. Daniela Sherer for NPR hide caption
Stanford bioengineering professor Manu Prakash looked to a children's toy to create a hand-powered centrifuge for processing blood tests. Kurt Hickman/Stanford University hide caption