4200 meters above Melbourne, Australia, a chemistry experiment is in progress.
These are the samples, which will be injected with metal and organic particles to form crystals at low gravity.
And this guy back here is Dr. JJ Richardson, the lead researcher.
JJ and his team study nanomaterials called Metal-Organic Frameworks,
which are considered the fastest-growing and most innovative class of materials in chemistry.
They're special because they have giant gaps in them, so they can act kind of like a nano-sponge
or a nano-sieve, where you can really selectively let molecules in or let molecules out of these crystals.
Their spongy quality means that MOFs can be used to both extract and deliver substances,
for instance, removing greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, or delivering therapeutic drugs
to targeted areas in our bodies.
MOFs are very customizable; there are now over 20,000 different types.
Altering even a single factor in the formation process, like temperature or water,
can yield a different type of MOF crystal application.
Forming Metal-Organic Frameworks, or MOFs, can be quite challenging...
often it was done at high pressure, with high temperature, and with toxic ingredients.
I don't want to use any toxic materials, so myself and colleagues, we started looking at ways
to make them kind of at room temperature.
The material we were using is a completely new material; it's sort of a super material.
We had a metal, which was either zinc or terbium,
and then we had an organic ligand that would bridge the metal nodes,
so we get that crystal framework.
In their quest to confirm which factors produce a more perfect MOF,
JJ's team decided to experiment with the ultimate variable: gravity.
Crystals normally have defects in them, and these defects occur because of dust,
or it gets too hot or too cold.
And so NASA wanted to see how they grow in the perfect conditions of outer space,
where gravity isn't sort of changing things.
So when we grow crystals in that, we don't have an up or down, and the crystals can grow in every direction,
very cleanly and uniformly.
But finding a low-gravity lab to experiment in would be expensive and difficult.
So JJ and his team considered other alternatives.
Looking at this experiment, we thought, 'you know,
we could use a centrifuge,' but that only increases gravity.
We can throw it off a building, which we did,
but it's quite quick and quite darty.
We could use a drone, but we had to get a professional drone pilot,
and there's limitations on how high they can fly.
We could toss it out of a hot air balloon,
but a) we'd have to not hit anybody, and b) we'd have to find it after we drop it.
and so we decided we had to jump out of a plane.
The experiment was designed to have three scientists skydive, and inject samples once in freefall.
We were in freefall for about 30 seconds.
We jumped, you'd go down really really close to 0g,
you have an air cushion, and you're at 1g again.
We had two guys on the ground.
They ran over, grabbed the samples, spun them down and washed them to stop the crystal growth
so we wouldn't get any artifacts.
It was a really smooth operation.
And the results were clear: low gravity yielded larger and more perfect crystals.
Their customizable crystalline structures create huge surface areas that become a chemistry playground.
Think of it this way: if you unfolded just one gram of a MOF,
it would cover an entire soccer field.
That's why they're considered miracle materials: the larger the MOF you're working with,
the more gasses you could theoretically store or chemical reactions you could catalyze.
That's why they have such exciting potential, from carbon capture to artificial photosynthesis,
to even next generation batteries and electronics.
Big, perfect crystals are important for everyday life, for pharmaceuticals, for energy.
So the more perfect they are, the better you can separate toxic molecules;
and we could also use them as sensors and detectors.
If you have some toxin or some cancer molecule,
it could go in those pores and tell you that this person's sick, or they've been poisoned, or something like that.
So this research potentially has has impacts all over.
The good thing with some of the research we're working on is that it will help everybody across the world,
rather than very small segments of society
and we really want to have that broad positive impact.
This episode was presented by the U.S. Air Force. Learn more at airforce.com.
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