Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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!

Amazing stuff

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.