Nanofluidic platforms can offer tunable material transport for biosensing, chemical detection and filtration. Research in the past had achieved elective and controlled ion transport based on electrical, optical and chemical gating methods of complex nanostructures. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Jake Rabinowitz and a team of researchers in electrical engineering, biological sciences and biomedical engineering at the Columbia University, New York, U.S., mechanically controlled nanofluidic transport using nanobubbles. They mechanically generated the nanobubbles made stable via surface pinning and verified them using cryogenic transmission electron microscopy techniques. The findings are relevant for nanofluidic device engineering and nanopipette-based applications.