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These Tiny Ultra-Porous Crystals Could Transform Cancer Treatments and More

Imagine a tiny sponge that weighs as much as a couple of sugar cubes, but that contains so many itty bitty pores that its surface area equals that of a football field.

What if scientists could engineer the sponge to serve a variety of therapeutic purposes, including storing drugs and enhancing cancer therapies? Such sponges exist, in a class of ultra-porous crystals known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs.

Researchers predict the crystalline compounds might rework healthcare, power and different industries.

Read the original article in The Wall Street Journal.

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Nature Makes Wood: Could a Lab Make It Better?

Environment
For millennia, humans have been chopping wood and harvesting plants, and how we've grown and extracted materials from the earth remains largely unchanged. A group of MIT researchers hopes to cut back on inefficiencies such as transportation and milling by growing wood-like plant tissue in the lab.