This year’s Nobel Prize-winning chemists designed porous materials that can pull water from the desert air, capture carbon dioxide from factories, and scoop pollution out of water.

They’re called metal-organic frameworks, and the Prize committee called them “a new form of molecular architecture.” The Nobel laureates are Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi.

Here & Now‘s Rob Schmitz speaks with Dorothy Phillips, President of the American Chemical Society.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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