Crystals built mostly of empty space can pull drinking water straight out of desert air
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi spent the 1990s and 2000s building metal-organic frameworks: crystals where metal ions are linked by carbon-based struts into huge internal cavities. The resulting materials can capture carbon dioxide, store gases, and harvest water from air, and they won the three chemists the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.