Lung cancer cells dividing Anne Weston, EM STP, the Francis Crick Institute/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Can you kill cancer cells by cutting off their electricity supply? That’s the implication of a new look at how cells swap electrons. It could herald devices that assemble inside tumours to switch off their electric current and starve them to death.

Frankie Rawson at the University of Nottingham, UK, and his colleagues have detected subtle changes in the bioelectric currents emanating from different types of cancer cells. These changes hint at what metabolic changes have happened in the cells to enable the rapid division …