A New Era of Research Highlights
Understanding the Subterranean World to Capture CO₂ Emissions
What happens miles beneath our feet has been largely a mystery — until now. Professor Behnam Jafarpour is working with Yan Liu, professor of computer science, on an AI tool to predict how water, carbon dioxide and energy move through underground rock formations with unprecedented accuracy. Think of it like a crystal ball for the Earth’s hidden depths. With the support of the National Science Foundation, this project could transform how we safely store captured carbon dioxide underground — a crucial weapon in the battle to reduce emissions. Instead of playing a guessing game about where to inject CO₂, scientists will finally have a reliable roadmap to the best storage sites, dramatically reducing the risk of leaks due to unexpected changes in the subsurface environment.
AI for Materials Discovery Unveils a Concrete That Can Eat Carbon
Imagine concrete that doesn’t just withstand earthquakes and fires but actually helps save the planet. Mork Department professor Ken-Ichi Nomura and computer science professor Aiichiro Nakano have cracked the code on creating carbon-neutral concrete using an AI model, Allegro-FM, which can simulate the behavior of over four billion atoms at once. Here’s the mind-bending part: they’ve figured out how to capture the carbon dioxide produced during concrete manufacturing and trap it permanently inside the concrete itself. Since concrete production currently pumps out 8% of the world’s CO₂ emissions, this discovery could be a game-changer for climate action. As a bonus, this “carbon-eating” concrete is more robust and would last far longer than today’s materials, which only last around 100 years.
Materials for Computers That Function More Like Brains
The human brain is the ultimate energy-efficient computer, processing complex thoughts while using less power than a light bulb. Now, researchers in the lab of Jayakanth Ravichandran, the Philip and Cayley MacDonald Endowed Early Career Chair, have discovered a material that could help computers behave more like our brains. The breakthrough semiconductor, barium titanium sulfide, has a remarkable property: it can instantly flip between different electrical states, just like the neurons in our brains. This discovery of the material’s rare phase transition could be highly valuable for future computing. The team has already built a working prototype device that mimics brain-like electrical patterns, paving the way for artificial intelligence systems that could think faster while consuming a fraction of the energy of today’s power-hungry data centers.
Lighting Up Cancer’s Secrets
Mork Department researchers have created a molecular flashlight that reveals crucial details about breast cancer cells. Ray Irani Chair in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Andrea Armani and her team developed a light-emitting molecule that acts like a molecular detective, activating when it encounters clusters of HER2 proteins — key players in about 20% of breast cancers. Here’s the clever part: the molecule stays dark when it can move freely, but glows when it becomes stuck to clustered HER2 proteins, giving doctors vital information about how cancer treatments are working. This breakthrough allows researchers to scan thousands of cells simultaneously using automated systems. This could mean faster drug testing, quicker results, and ultimately, more lives saved in the race against cancer.
A Nanoparticle to Turn Pollution into Power
What if the smokestacks pumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere could instead become fuel factories? In collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Mork Family Department associate chair Noah Malmstadt and his team discovered a nanoparticle that works like a tiny recycling center, converting CO₂ emissions into the basic fuel stock — hydrocarbons. Better still, these catalyst particles can now be made sustainably at low temperatures using miniature chemical reactors smaller than a millimeter across. Previous methods required energy-intensive heating to over 600° centigrade, making them impractical for large-scale use. Now, the same particles can be produced at just 300° centigrade using “green chemistry” methods, creating uniform, high-quality catalysts. Imagine power plants that capture their own emissions and turn them into the very fuel that keeps them running — a true carbon-neutral closed loop.