6 ms·

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025

321 points by pykello 1y ago

isoprophlex 1y ago
So... these are very fun materials, a kind of real-life menger sponges with huge internal surface area. Some fifteen years ago, as an intern working for a company making desulfurization catalysts (stuff that removes nasty sulfur compounds from crude oil so they don't stink up the gas you put in your car), I prepared a few of the easy-to-handle air stable ones. Reactions between fluids and a solid catalyst take place on the catalyst surface, so higher surface area = higher reaction rates = better. I remember everyone's minds at the company being completely blown by the ridiculous surface areas of my attempts at recreating some random MOFs from literature. Got awarded the highest possible grade for no reason other than (badly) following a few procedures and measuring that indeed, their internal surface area was insanely big. Thanks Yaghi and co. I'll always fondly remember your MOFs.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > ... Got awarded the highest possible grade for no reason other than (badly) following a few procedures and measuring that indeed, their internal surface area was insanely big It's totally OK to experiment with these things, but wouldn't you then have to worry about these application areas being patented and having to enter into costly licensing deals if you wanted to use them in industry?
  - mikeyouse 1y ago
    OP was an intern - the potential commercialization of the tech would be left up to the rest of the team. And "costly" is a very relative term.. Exxon earned like $350 billion in revenue last year with over $30 billion in profit. They'd be happy to invest in cutting edge tech if it simplifies their supply chain or removes some steps or units from their refining process.
  - condensedcrab 1y ago
    IANAL, but I suspect that the IP situation is similar to current uses, such as catalytic converters. New tech and specific applications can be covered for commercialization, but the general "idea" of using MOFs for adsorption is broad enough that you'd probably only get into legal hot water if you tried to introduce a direct competitor to someone in the market.
  - isoprophlex 1y ago
    In addition to what condensedcrab and mikeyouse wrote, there is a HUGE gap between a commercially viable, patentable product and a freely accessible paper stating "take copper acetate and benzenetricarboxylic acid, stir at pH so and so and remove the volatiles in vacuum". The resulting blue crunchy mess is NOWHERE near something on a support material that you throw into a fluidized bed reactor for reaction at elevated temperature for months on end. And that's where the proprietary magic happens.
    - throwawaymaths 1y ago
      is desulfurization endothermic? one thing I'd worry about when increasing the surface area that much for an industrialized process is making your reaction vat into a bomb
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  > a kind of real-life menger sponges with huge internal surface area And me, I've been here the whole time!
  - lisper 1y ago
    Oh, come on, now you have to tell the story behind your user name!
    - evertedsphere 1y ago
      sometimes you just happen to be a mathematical object
      - MengerSponge 1y ago
        Perhaps everyone is a mathematical object and I'm just a little more self-aware
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      My education included some advanced math courses and a bit of computer graphics, so it's not much of a story: it's my favorite fractal!
shevy-java 1y ago
Hmmm. This years' nobel prizes are a bit more boring compared to prior ones. I understand that not all ideas or inventions are created equal, but I prefer more raw epicness.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  The Nobel prizes are not there to produce good sounding opeds and "epic" news to entertain the general public. It’s a prize given to scientists to highlight and encourage valuable research according to a jury of pairs.
- gerikson 1y ago
  When you have a yearly prize, you're bound to get off-years. Maybe the Nobels should be structured to only be given out every 4 years, like the Olympics. But that would be a huge blow to the Stockholm hospitality business.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    You hit it on the head: comparing the Nobel prizes to the Olympics. Perhaps to some they look too much like the Olympics: periodic, awarded in various categories. I suggest the similarities end there though.
- nylonstrung 1y ago
  This seems pretty epic to me- an entirely new material primitive with novel real world properties
- speed_spread 1y ago
  You can't discover cold fusion every year.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Aaaay! (Ouch)
- PlasmonOwl 1y ago
Metacelsus 1y ago
MOFs have been the "hot thing" in chemistry for about the past decade so this certainly isn't a surprise. Congrats to the laureates!
pama 1y ago
This is as cool as it gets for using organic chemistry to design materials: design your own little lego blocks and let them self assemble into a humongous structure.
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  Nature figured that out a half billion years ago :-)
  - pama 1y ago
    I guess I should have added “periodic” structures, explained self assemble, ... oh well. So, No, nature didnt figure out anything close to these constructs until it evolved humans who did it. Zeolites exist in nature but they are not made up of organic molecules and were not as easily designable materials until these techniques were developed.
    - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
      > No, nature didnt figure out anything close to these constructs until it evolved humans who did it. Zeolites exist in nature but they are not made up of organic molecules and were not as easily designable materials until these techniques were developed. So you're discounting living organisms themselves?
ripe 1y ago
Very well-written description. Unfortunately, my brain stumbled over a few annoyances: 1. In the phrase "metal–organic": that's not a hyphen in the text. 2. What's with the dropped apostrophe: "the ions and molecules inherent attraction to each other mattered" Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to comment on such things, but they're distracting in otherwise good copy.
- queuebert 1y ago
  1. Very few people these days understand the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. And then converting fonts and character sets on the internet adds another layer of error generation. We could settle on using a single '-' for hyphen and en-dash and a ' -- ' for em-dashes in fonts that don't have a ligature, but that hasn't carried down from the typewriter days for some reason. Microsoft Word is probably a big part of why. 2. No excuse for this.
- svat 1y ago
  (2) is just a typo but as for (1) “metal–organic” correctly uses an en dash, and this is quite nice to see. They're consistently using the en dash even in their tweets etc, which is lovely. (Wikipedia gives examples like “Boston–Hartford route” and “Bose–Einstein statistics”. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dash&oldid=1312172208#Relationships_and_connections https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dash&oldid=131217... )
  - ripe 1y ago
    Thank you! TIL that the term is analogous to Boston-Hartford route. (I failed to type the en-dash here on my mobile)
- whizzter 1y ago
  Probably written by Swedish persons, we also use -s suffixes in many places but basically never with apostrophes so using them when writing English can be a bit hard to get correct (and vice-versa going back to Swedish it's easy to add them in the wrong places).
rafa___ 1y ago
Amazing stuff
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Octoth0rpe 1y ago
I'm quite confused by some of the units used in the article. For example: > A couple of grams of MOF-5 holds an area as big as a football pitch grams are of course a measure of mass, and a football pitch is presumably a measure of 2d space. Does anyone have any idea how these relate? I can imagine some heavily modified form of this making sense, such as: a couple of grams of MOF-5 is able to contain the amount of gas that would fill a standard football stadium at 1 atmosphere of pressure, but that amount of mangling seems unreasonable.
- svara 1y ago
  It's the internal surface area. Like saying 10 grams of Swiss cheese has X surface area in its holes on average.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  Imagine a very very thin blanket the size of a football pitch scrunched into a very small ball.
batterychem 1y ago
There's a running joke about MOFs in the physical and inorganic chemistry worlds - their only real-world application is producing JACS papers. Bit of a disappointing prize, but hey, at least it went to chemists this year!
- semitones 1y ago
  What if down the line we discover that MOFs can be used for sophisticated drug delivery? Imagine a therapy like this: a patient lies on a magnetic table, and is administered a dose of MOFs containing a specific drug, via bloodstream injection. The metal of choice is the MOF is magnetic. The magnetic table slowly guides the MOFs towards the part of the body that requires the drug, keeping them concentrated there for some period of time while the drug if absorbed by the body. If it is then necessary/ideal to remove the MOFs, the procedure can be performed in reverse. The patient's blood is drawn, and the MOFs are guided to the site of the injection. An external appartus filters the MOFs out of the blood, and returns the filtered blood to the patient (to minimize blood loss). This therapy could take something like 1-2 hours and could potentially be a drastically more efficient way to administer drugs, because they will primarily affect the target organ/region rather than be necessarily dispersed throughout the whole body, which would result in better intervention outcomes, and less side-effects.
- owenversteeg 1y ago
  My only connection to the field is that I am a guy who uses zeolites in a redneck way - so take this with a huge heap of salt - but I think this is a three part chicken and egg problem. People don't use MOFs because they're expensive, they're expensive because they're not mass-produced, and they're not mass produced because the shape of the demand is uncertain. The shape of the demand is the tricky bit. They're not like many other emerging technologies; they are a whole class of materials with wildly different properties, each of which you can produce in several forms; and production is wildly different depending on the type. If there is demand for X tons/yr, spread across 10 industries, but 90% of that demand is in one industry that requires properties of XYZ, then you need to produce the right MOFs in the right form. The issue, in my mind, is that a lot of this stuff sort of requires a very large vertically integrated company or government project to kickstart it. You can't go out as a company and say "we want to buy X tons of MIL-53(Sc)" [0], nobody would sell it to you. You also can't go out as a producer and start making X tons of MIL-53(Sc) either. The ideal would be that you are, say, TSMC and it would enhance one of your processes, so you make a few kg in house, you use most of it, you sell the rest, and kickstart an industry in that way. From my perspective - which, again, take with a heap of salt - I think that academia could do their part by "advertising" the most promising candidates better. The list of MOFs is long and many are not usable or stable in real world conditions. Take some of the more promising candidates out of the lab and do some demos with industry. Put together some videos. Write up some honest reports toward an engineer's point of view. That would provide a real boost towards real-world applications. [0] I just picked MIL-53(Sc) because it's funny, obviously nobody in the real world is going to use scandium in a production product.
owenversteeg 1y ago
Congratulations to the laureates! Well deserved. The article gives a good simplified explanation, here is my shorter explanation: porous materials, like sponges, have a lot of surface area, which is useful for two main reasons: 1) speeding up reaction rates and 2) capturing and releasing molecules (water, CO2, pollutants, etc.) More surface area is more valuable. Before, the most surface area we had was with zeolites, which are aluminosilicate minerals which occur naturally and are also synthetically produced - the synthetics mostly produced by trial and error. MOFs are unique in a few ways; for one, they are rationally designed molecules where we can predict some properties, and two, the surface area is far higher than zeolites. Zeolites range from 10-1700 m2/gram based on how you measure (most are from 20-400) and MOFs range from 1000-7000+. Unfortunately MOFs are still quite expensive and very much on the cutting edge, so I am forced to use zeolites anytime I want a lot of surface area, but they are getting more accessible (you can now buy them on Amazon!) and I imagine the price will come down for some of the simpler to make MOFs in the near future.
- gwerbret 1y ago
  Thank you. This is the sort of contextual overview that should really float to the top of discussions like this.
kaycebasques 1y ago
The story about the "aha!" moment inspires me to find ways to physically play with ideas more: > When the workshop returned the wooden balls, he tested building some molecules. This was when he had a moment of insight: there was a vast amount of information baked into the holes’ positioning. The model molecules automatically had the correct form and structure, because of where the holes were situated. This insight led to his next idea: what would happen if he utilised the atoms’ inherent properties to link together different types of molecules, rather than individual atoms? Could he design new types of molecular constructions?
- btilly 1y ago
  In Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman tells the story of how he managed to end a dry spell where he couldn't come up with good research ideas. He was in a cafeteria, someone slipped, and accidentally threw a plate into the air. Feynman could see it spinning, and could see that it had a wobble that spun, and wondered if he could figure out the ratio between the two. The piece of mathematics that he worked out had no particular purpose. But having it turned out to be essential later in the work that earned him a Nobel prize. Never underestimate the value of play!
  - biofox 1y ago
    >Never underestimate the value of play! I don't. It's my boss who doesn't see the value :(
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nee1r 1y ago
Love MOFs! Did research about MOFs <=> language modeling a couple years ago and I'm excited to see them getting more coverage https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07617 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07617
BurningFrog 1y ago
The practical applications, should expectations pan out, are pretty fantastic. - Harvesting water from air anywhere, including the desert, would be incredibly useful. Maybe we can make the air too dry somehow, but that should be manageable. - I expect the world will solve the CO₂ global warming situation by sequestering the excess CO₂ underground. We know how to sequester gas from the natural gas industry. We just need a way to grab pure CO₂ from the atmosphere. MOFs look like they'll be the best way to do that!
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  > We just need a way to grab pure CO₂ from the atmosphere. You really understate the absolutely massive amount of resources it would take to actually do this.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    First of all: You may well be right about the cost! Of course, to solve the biggest problem on the planet, absolutely massive amounts of resources may be the right size investment. The way I imagine this to work is that a future MOF material spontaneously accumulates CO₂ molecules from the atmosphere. When it's "full" the CO₂ is extracted (this may be the hard part), and pumped underground (this is mature tech). If you can go through this cycle without destroying the MOF, it seems pretty sustainable to me.
- lentil_soup 1y ago
  > Harvesting water from air anywhere Could this lead to better dehumidifiers?
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    Yeah, it's pretty much the same technology. I looked around, and commercial products are starting to appear, but so far the prices have a few too many zeros for home use: https://airjouletech.com/industry/moisture-control/ https://airjouletech.com/industry/moisture-control/
dtgriscom 1y ago
Derek Lowe's commentary: https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline
gsf_emergency_4 1y ago
Prof Kitagawa's ref to the Taoist Zhuangzi on takumigokoro (匠心, ~the maker Soul) needs fleshing out: According to the referenced legend, the carpenter Lu Ban excels at building intricate but useful wooden structures (~ MOFs). Ntheless this striving after usefulness impedes his craft- he will not be able to attain the immortality he ultimately seeks. Zhuangzi muses that Lu Ban fails to appreciate the "usefulness of the useless" (Zz turns out wrong-- Lu Ban was later deified by craftsmen)

321 points by pykello 1y ago

So... these are very fun materials, a kind of real-life menger sponges with huge internal surface area. Some fifteen years ago, as an intern working for a company making desulfurization catalysts (stuff that removes nasty sulfur compounds from crude oil so they don't stink up the gas you put in your car), I prepared a few of the easy-to-handle air stable ones. Reactions between fluids and a solid catalyst take place on the catalyst surface, so higher surface area = higher reaction rates = better. I remember everyone's minds at the company being completely blown by the ridiculous surface areas of my attempts at recreating some random MOFs from literature. Got awarded the highest possible grade for no reason other than (badly) following a few procedures and measuring that indeed, their internal surface area was insanely big. Thanks Yaghi and co. I'll always fondly remember your MOFs.

zozbot234 1y ago
> ... Got awarded the highest possible grade for no reason other than (badly) following a few procedures and measuring that indeed, their internal surface area was insanely big It's totally OK to experiment with these things, but wouldn't you then have to worry about these application areas being patented and having to enter into costly licensing deals if you wanted to use them in industry?
- mikeyouse 1y ago
  OP was an intern - the potential commercialization of the tech would be left up to the rest of the team. And "costly" is a very relative term.. Exxon earned like $350 billion in revenue last year with over $30 billion in profit. They'd be happy to invest in cutting edge tech if it simplifies their supply chain or removes some steps or units from their refining process.
- condensedcrab 1y ago
  IANAL, but I suspect that the IP situation is similar to current uses, such as catalytic converters. New tech and specific applications can be covered for commercialization, but the general "idea" of using MOFs for adsorption is broad enough that you'd probably only get into legal hot water if you tried to introduce a direct competitor to someone in the market.
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  In addition to what condensedcrab and mikeyouse wrote, there is a HUGE gap between a commercially viable, patentable product and a freely accessible paper stating "take copper acetate and benzenetricarboxylic acid, stir at pH so and so and remove the volatiles in vacuum". The resulting blue crunchy mess is NOWHERE near something on a support material that you throw into a fluidized bed reactor for reaction at elevated temperature for months on end. And that's where the proprietary magic happens.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    is desulfurization endothermic? one thing I'd worry about when increasing the surface area that much for an industrialized process is making your reaction vat into a bomb
MengerSponge 1y ago
> a kind of real-life menger sponges with huge internal surface area And me, I've been here the whole time!
- lisper 1y ago
  Oh, come on, now you have to tell the story behind your user name!
  - evertedsphere 1y ago
    sometimes you just happen to be a mathematical object
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      Perhaps everyone is a mathematical object and I'm just a little more self-aware
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    My education included some advanced math courses and a bit of computer graphics, so it's not much of a story: it's my favorite fractal!

shevy-java 1y ago

Hmmm. This years' nobel prizes are a bit more boring compared to prior ones. I understand that not all ideas or inventions are created equal, but I prefer more raw epicness.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
The Nobel prizes are not there to produce good sounding opeds and "epic" news to entertain the general public. It’s a prize given to scientists to highlight and encourage valuable research according to a jury of pairs.
gerikson 1y ago
When you have a yearly prize, you're bound to get off-years. Maybe the Nobels should be structured to only be given out every 4 years, like the Olympics. But that would be a huge blow to the Stockholm hospitality business.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  You hit it on the head: comparing the Nobel prizes to the Olympics. Perhaps to some they look too much like the Olympics: periodic, awarded in various categories. I suggest the similarities end there though.
nylonstrung 1y ago
This seems pretty epic to me- an entirely new material primitive with novel real world properties
speed_spread 1y ago
You can't discover cold fusion every year.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Aaaay! (Ouch)
PlasmonOwl 1y ago

Metacelsus 1y ago

MOFs have been the "hot thing" in chemistry for about the past decade so this certainly isn't a surprise. Congrats to the laureates!

pama 1y ago

This is as cool as it gets for using organic chemistry to design materials: design your own little lego blocks and let them self assemble into a humongous structure.

SJC_Hacker 1y ago
Nature figured that out a half billion years ago :-)
- pama 1y ago
  I guess I should have added “periodic” structures, explained self assemble, ... oh well. So, No, nature didnt figure out anything close to these constructs until it evolved humans who did it. Zeolites exist in nature but they are not made up of organic molecules and were not as easily designable materials until these techniques were developed.
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    > No, nature didnt figure out anything close to these constructs until it evolved humans who did it. Zeolites exist in nature but they are not made up of organic molecules and were not as easily designable materials until these techniques were developed. So you're discounting living organisms themselves?

ripe 1y ago

Very well-written description. Unfortunately, my brain stumbled over a few annoyances: 1. In the phrase "metal–organic": that's not a hyphen in the text. 2. What's with the dropped apostrophe: "the ions and molecules inherent attraction to each other mattered" Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to comment on such things, but they're distracting in otherwise good copy.

queuebert 1y ago
1. Very few people these days understand the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. And then converting fonts and character sets on the internet adds another layer of error generation. We could settle on using a single '-' for hyphen and en-dash and a ' -- ' for em-dashes in fonts that don't have a ligature, but that hasn't carried down from the typewriter days for some reason. Microsoft Word is probably a big part of why. 2. No excuse for this.
svat 1y ago
(2) is just a typo but as for (1) “metal–organic” correctly uses an en dash, and this is quite nice to see. They're consistently using the en dash even in their tweets etc, which is lovely. (Wikipedia gives examples like “Boston–Hartford route” and “Bose–Einstein statistics”. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dash&oldid=1312172208#Relationships_and_connections https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dash&oldid=131217... )
- ripe 1y ago
  Thank you! TIL that the term is analogous to Boston-Hartford route. (I failed to type the en-dash here on my mobile)
whizzter 1y ago
Probably written by Swedish persons, we also use -s suffixes in many places but basically never with apostrophes so using them when writing English can be a bit hard to get correct (and vice-versa going back to Swedish it's easy to add them in the wrong places).

rafa___ 1y ago

Amazing stuff

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Octoth0rpe 1y ago

I'm quite confused by some of the units used in the article. For example: > A couple of grams of MOF-5 holds an area as big as a football pitch grams are of course a measure of mass, and a football pitch is presumably a measure of 2d space. Does anyone have any idea how these relate? I can imagine some heavily modified form of this making sense, such as: a couple of grams of MOF-5 is able to contain the amount of gas that would fill a standard football stadium at 1 atmosphere of pressure, but that amount of mangling seems unreasonable.

svara 1y ago
It's the internal surface area. Like saying 10 grams of Swiss cheese has X surface area in its holes on average.
mr_toad 1y ago
Imagine a very very thin blanket the size of a football pitch scrunched into a very small ball.

batterychem 1y ago

There's a running joke about MOFs in the physical and inorganic chemistry worlds - their only real-world application is producing JACS papers. Bit of a disappointing prize, but hey, at least it went to chemists this year!

semitones 1y ago
What if down the line we discover that MOFs can be used for sophisticated drug delivery? Imagine a therapy like this: a patient lies on a magnetic table, and is administered a dose of MOFs containing a specific drug, via bloodstream injection. The metal of choice is the MOF is magnetic. The magnetic table slowly guides the MOFs towards the part of the body that requires the drug, keeping them concentrated there for some period of time while the drug if absorbed by the body. If it is then necessary/ideal to remove the MOFs, the procedure can be performed in reverse. The patient's blood is drawn, and the MOFs are guided to the site of the injection. An external appartus filters the MOFs out of the blood, and returns the filtered blood to the patient (to minimize blood loss). This therapy could take something like 1-2 hours and could potentially be a drastically more efficient way to administer drugs, because they will primarily affect the target organ/region rather than be necessarily dispersed throughout the whole body, which would result in better intervention outcomes, and less side-effects.
owenversteeg 1y ago
My only connection to the field is that I am a guy who uses zeolites in a redneck way - so take this with a huge heap of salt - but I think this is a three part chicken and egg problem. People don't use MOFs because they're expensive, they're expensive because they're not mass-produced, and they're not mass produced because the shape of the demand is uncertain. The shape of the demand is the tricky bit. They're not like many other emerging technologies; they are a whole class of materials with wildly different properties, each of which you can produce in several forms; and production is wildly different depending on the type. If there is demand for X tons/yr, spread across 10 industries, but 90% of that demand is in one industry that requires properties of XYZ, then you need to produce the right MOFs in the right form. The issue, in my mind, is that a lot of this stuff sort of requires a very large vertically integrated company or government project to kickstart it. You can't go out as a company and say "we want to buy X tons of MIL-53(Sc)" [0], nobody would sell it to you. You also can't go out as a producer and start making X tons of MIL-53(Sc) either. The ideal would be that you are, say, TSMC and it would enhance one of your processes, so you make a few kg in house, you use most of it, you sell the rest, and kickstart an industry in that way. From my perspective - which, again, take with a heap of salt - I think that academia could do their part by "advertising" the most promising candidates better. The list of MOFs is long and many are not usable or stable in real world conditions. Take some of the more promising candidates out of the lab and do some demos with industry. Put together some videos. Write up some honest reports toward an engineer's point of view. That would provide a real boost towards real-world applications. [0] I just picked MIL-53(Sc) because it's funny, obviously nobody in the real world is going to use scandium in a production product.

owenversteeg 1y ago

Congratulations to the laureates! Well deserved. The article gives a good simplified explanation, here is my shorter explanation: porous materials, like sponges, have a lot of surface area, which is useful for two main reasons: 1) speeding up reaction rates and 2) capturing and releasing molecules (water, CO2, pollutants, etc.) More surface area is more valuable. Before, the most surface area we had was with zeolites, which are aluminosilicate minerals which occur naturally and are also synthetically produced - the synthetics mostly produced by trial and error. MOFs are unique in a few ways; for one, they are rationally designed molecules where we can predict some properties, and two, the surface area is far higher than zeolites. Zeolites range from 10-1700 m2/gram based on how you measure (most are from 20-400) and MOFs range from 1000-7000+. Unfortunately MOFs are still quite expensive and very much on the cutting edge, so I am forced to use zeolites anytime I want a lot of surface area, but they are getting more accessible (you can now buy them on Amazon!) and I imagine the price will come down for some of the simpler to make MOFs in the near future.

gwerbret 1y ago
Thank you. This is the sort of contextual overview that should really float to the top of discussions like this.

kaycebasques 1y ago

The story about the "aha!" moment inspires me to find ways to physically play with ideas more: > When the workshop returned the wooden balls, he tested building some molecules. This was when he had a moment of insight: there was a vast amount of information baked into the holes’ positioning. The model molecules automatically had the correct form and structure, because of where the holes were situated. This insight led to his next idea: what would happen if he utilised the atoms’ inherent properties to link together different types of molecules, rather than individual atoms? Could he design new types of molecular constructions?

btilly 1y ago
In Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman tells the story of how he managed to end a dry spell where he couldn't come up with good research ideas. He was in a cafeteria, someone slipped, and accidentally threw a plate into the air. Feynman could see it spinning, and could see that it had a wobble that spun, and wondered if he could figure out the ratio between the two. The piece of mathematics that he worked out had no particular purpose. But having it turned out to be essential later in the work that earned him a Nobel prize. Never underestimate the value of play!
- biofox 1y ago
  >Never underestimate the value of play! I don't. It's my boss who doesn't see the value :(

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nee1r 1y ago

Love MOFs! Did research about MOFs <=> language modeling a couple years ago and I'm excited to see them getting more coverage https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07617 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07617

BurningFrog 1y ago

The practical applications, should expectations pan out, are pretty fantastic. - Harvesting water from air anywhere, including the desert, would be incredibly useful. Maybe we can make the air too dry somehow, but that should be manageable. - I expect the world will solve the CO₂ global warming situation by sequestering the excess CO₂ underground. We know how to sequester gas from the natural gas industry. We just need a way to grab pure CO₂ from the atmosphere. MOFs look like they'll be the best way to do that!

SoftTalker 1y ago
> We just need a way to grab pure CO₂ from the atmosphere. You really understate the absolutely massive amount of resources it would take to actually do this.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  First of all: You may well be right about the cost! Of course, to solve the biggest problem on the planet, absolutely massive amounts of resources may be the right size investment. The way I imagine this to work is that a future MOF material spontaneously accumulates CO₂ molecules from the atmosphere. When it's "full" the CO₂ is extracted (this may be the hard part), and pumped underground (this is mature tech). If you can go through this cycle without destroying the MOF, it seems pretty sustainable to me.
lentil_soup 1y ago
> Harvesting water from air anywhere Could this lead to better dehumidifiers?
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty much the same technology. I looked around, and commercial products are starting to appear, but so far the prices have a few too many zeros for home use: https://airjouletech.com/industry/moisture-control/ https://airjouletech.com/industry/moisture-control/

dtgriscom 1y ago

Derek Lowe's commentary: https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline

gsf_emergency_4 1y ago

Prof Kitagawa's ref to the Taoist Zhuangzi on takumigokoro (匠心, ~the maker Soul) needs fleshing out: According to the referenced legend, the carpenter Lu Ban excels at building intricate but useful wooden structures (~ MOFs). Ntheless this striving after usefulness impedes his craft- he will not be able to attain the immortality he ultimately seeks. Zhuangzi muses that Lu Ban fails to appreciate the "usefulness of the useless" (Zz turns out wrong-- Lu Ban was later deified by craftsmen)