Metal–organic framework

They argued the structure is not a necklace of separate little metal beads.

It is an extended metal organic framework, a MOF, the kind of material human chemists build in labs for storage, separation, catalysts, electronics, the kind whose inventors were just handed a Nobel Prize.

If the claim holds, this is the first known MOF grown by an organism, not cooked in a flask, grown in mud.

Conductivity numbers depend on what you measure.

Whole fibers have been clocked at values that already embarrass most biological materials.

Work by a Victoria University researcher may prove the country's next big gas reserve has already been discovered, and it lies in the national dairy herd.

Dr Luke Liu works in a relatively new and emerging field as a materials chemist, combining the likes of conventional metals with organic compounds to create metal organic frameworks, or MOFs.

Dr Liu says metal organic frameworks could prove an effective harvesting tool for New Zealand's abundant dairy cow methane supply.

Total dairy herd emissions are about 17 million tonnes a year in New Zealand, but leu maintains a significant portion could be captured in the farm dairy at milking, with the right MOF technology in place.

And we worked also with my husband, Christian Borgs, and with other people.

And when ChatGPT came out, we asked, "Could we synthesize these amazing materials that Omar had created 30 years earlier called MOFs, metal organic frameworks? Could we synthesize them faster?" Metal organic frameworks are the most porous materials known to man.

A gram has the internal surface area, 'cause it's so porous, of a football field.

So they can do amazing things.

So each week on this show, I'm given a personal pick, so that's the chance to tell any story that I'd like to with the help of the bottomless well of the BBC's audio archives.

So digging around in there from last year and a Science in Action episode, they did a show about the Nobel Prize winners and winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry, here's Omar Yaghi explaining MOF or metal organic framework, his prize-winning material.

They're extremely porous.

In, in one gram of such material, uh, you could have the footage of, you know, 10, 20 apartments, or you could say more than a football field.

It's a complete step change in technology to how it's been done previously.

Basically, dehumidification machines that use dew point/refrigeration technology, which has been around for 60, 70 years, but those, uh, machines are very limited in the environments in which they can operate.

By using MOFs, we've managed to open up a huge part of the world, which is typically more arid and hotter, where those traditional machines don't work and ours does.

And I think the, the key component for this is something I saw earlier at your R&D labs, and it, it looks a lot like washing powder, right?

And so what we can do is we can now, uh, basically come up with an entirely new molecule for a very specific task, and then make it in the lab, and then use that for that, for that particular task.

Um, I should say CUSP is not only working on MOFs.

In fact, this was just the first set of molecules that we worked with.

Uh, we have hence expanded, um, to semiconductors.