The Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who created revolutionary porous materials that can harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and remove toxins from water.
Susumu Kitagawa, of Kyoto University, Richard Robson, of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi, of the University of California, Berkeley, shared the 11m Swedish kronor (about £871,400) prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
The trio found ways to combine metal ions and organic molecules into highly porous structures through which liquids and gases could flow. Tens of thousands of such materials have since been made for applications ranging from storing hydrogen to removing forever chemicals from water and recovering valuable rare earth metals from waste.
The scientists were honoured “for the development of metal-organic frameworks”, or MOFs, which have such potential that they have been called the material of the 21st century.
Speaking at the prize announcement, Prof Heiner Linke, the chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, said: “They have found ways to create materials, entirely novel materials with large cavities on the inside, which can be seen almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material.
“A small amount of such material can be almost like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter. It can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume.”
