It's helpful when reading these kinds of things to realize what you're reading. This isn't research. It's a press release. The author lists himself as a "Public Information Officer" for UC San Diego. Looking back through his article archives, it appears most, if not all, of the press releases make heavy emphasis of technology used by the research rather than anything about the research itself.

Go the current very last page and he's hyping up nanotech in 2015, which as far as I'm aware, didn't end up panning out or really going anywhere. https://today.ucsd.edu/archives/author/Liezel_Labios/P260