[HN Gopher] Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025
Author : pykello
Score : 289 points
Date : 2025-10-08 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nobelprize.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nobelprize.org)
| isoprophlex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > ... 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > a kind of real-life menger sponges with huge internal surface
| area
|
| And me, I've been here the whole time!
| lisper wrote:
| Oh, come on, now you have to tell the story behind your user
| name!
| evertedsphere wrote:
| sometimes you just happen to be a mathematical object
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| gerikson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This seems pretty epic to me- an entirely new material
| primitive with novel real world properties
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| 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.
| speed_spread wrote:
| You can't discover cold fusion every year.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Aaaay! (Ouch)
| PlasmonOwl wrote:
| What do you mean boring? MOFs are a fascinating area of
| chemistry. Outside of nature, they are most likely our best
| example of rationally designed nanoscale systems. In chemistry,
| rational design - that based on rules - is a rare thing.
| Molecules bump around and stick together in unpredictable ways,
| but MOFs allow us to create very well defined nanoscale
| frameworks. They're famously tricky, though!
| queuebert wrote:
| How about the Ig Nobel Prize?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You'll have to wait for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement if
| you want to see some "epicness" this year.
| whizzter wrote:
| While quantum-tunneling is quite niche I think it's given to
| demonstrate something with everyday life application
| (considering the outsized impact of microprocessors on
| society).
|
| This MoF thing is quite damn cool though, advancing moisture
| capturing in arid regions itself is big.
|
| But also being able to separate chemicals in a more controlled
| manner sounds like something really groundbreaking that will
| probably impact chemistry for a long time to come.
| CalChris wrote:
| Quantum tunneling has been productized for _decades_.
|
| https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Fairview-
| Microwave/FMMT...
| condensedcrab wrote:
| Nobel prizes in Physics and Chemistry tend to be awarded long
| after discovery. It's part of the process in evaluating the
| impact of a specific discovery.
|
| That being said, you get stuff like high Tc superconductors
| that are awarded the following year:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1987/press-release...
| j7ake wrote:
| Rather than scoff at the selection, maybe use the opportunity
| to recalibrate and expand what one considers "interesting"?
| astrange wrote:
| Last years were rather tortured. It feels weird to give the
| chemistry prize to the CEO of a computer science lab.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nature figured that out a half billion years ago :-)
| ripe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| (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=131217...
| )
| ripe wrote:
| Thank you! TIL that the term is analogous to Boston-Hartford
| route. (I failed to type the en-dash here on my mobile)
| whizzter wrote:
| 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___ wrote:
| Amazing stuff
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's the internal surface area. Like saying 10 grams of Swiss
| cheese has X surface area in its holes on average.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Imagine a very very thin blanket the size of a football pitch
| scrunched into a very small ball.
| batterychem wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| batterychem wrote:
| There definitely is a bit of chicken-egg going on. But at the
| same time, if there was a truly emerging market, people would
| find a way to try and force it.
|
| Right now the main issue is that there aren't even really
| great, cheap ways to mass produce them. Almost everything
| that's been performed on MOFs has been at the laboratory
| scale, and there's not necessarily a clear path to scale up.
| And there are fundamental cost-to-effect ratio issues that
| can't necessarily be easily overcome.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you. This is the sort of contextual overview that should
| really float to the top of discussions like this.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >Never underestimate the value of play!
|
| I don't. It's my boss who doesn't see the value :(
| nee1r wrote:
| 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
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Harvesting water from air anywhere
|
| Could this lead to better dehumidifiers?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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/
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Derek Lowe's commentary: https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline
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