Targeting nanotube drug delivery

The headline reads: Exploding Carbon Nanotubes Could Work as Drug-Based Delivery Devices. The idea is that sealed carbon nanotubes can serve to deliver tiny amounts of drugs to cells, and instead of expecting the drugs to slowly leak out (rather randomly), you can raise the local temperature with a laser (or I suppose a probe of some kind for spots deep inside the body) and make water in the little tubes pop them like popcorn.

Cute idea, though I wonder about the fragments. They admit that shock waves from the pop might be problematic. They'd be weak, but so is some of the cellular machinery.

Apparently water confined in a nanotube exhibits somewhat different characteristics, behaving a little more like a gas while well below the usual boiling point. I'm not sure why this would be so. Perhaps the geometry is too one-dimensional to permit the full range of motions that let attracted molecules dance around each other, though I'd naively expect that to increase viscosity. Maybe some of the nanotubes have enough conductivity (it varies) that interference from induced charges reduces how well the real molecules attract each other. I'll look into that