Prostate cancer is one of the most common malignancies in men globally. Hormonal therapies targeting the androgen–androgen receptor axis have significantly delayed disease progression. However, drug resistance remains inevitable, and new therapeutic targets and strategies are required to overcome androgen receptor pathway inhibitor (ARPI) resistance.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Li Zhenfei’s team from the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science (Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Dr. Hu Youhong’s team and Liu Jia’s team from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica of CAS, and Dr. Ren Ruobing’s team from Fudan University designed a novel 3βHSD1 inhibitor, HEAL-116, which has superior enzymatic activity and favorable pharmacokinetic properties, providing a new strategy for prostate cancer treatment and overcoming resistance to second-generation ARPIs.
Previous research by Dr. Li’s team has identified the metabolic enzyme 3βHSD1 as a key driver for prostate cancer progression, which regulates the metabolism of androgen, progesterone, and abiraterone, mediating resistance to ARPIs, and has also identified biochanin A (BCA) as a potent 3βHSD1 inhibitor to suppress the development of prostate cancer in cell lines, mouse models, and even patients. However, BCA’s low oral bioavailability hindered its clinical translation.
In this study, the researchers constructed a high-precision structure model of 3βHSD1 by integrating AlphaFold2 protein structure predictions, molecular dynamics simulations, quantum chemistry calculations and other techniques, and revealed its unique catalytic mechanism and substrate-binding pocket characteristics.
Through systematic optimization of BCA’s molecular geometry and charge distribution, the researchers developed HEAL-116, a highly specific inhibitor with enhanced binding affinity and improved oral bioavailability via hydrophilic group modifications.
In vivo and in vitro experiments showed that HEAL-116 potently suppressed 3βHSD1 activity and inhibited the growth of prostate cancer xenografts, when used alone or in combination with ARPIs. The specificity of HEAL-116 was also evaluated, showing no significant effects on transcriptome and kinome.
This study validates the artificial intelligence-driven rational drug design strategy. It provides a new strategy to overcome prostate cancer drug resistance, and promotes the clinical application of 3βHSD1-targeted therapy.
Proteins have specific biological functions in cells through conformational changes and interactions. Therefore, precise, in situ analysis of protein complex changes is essential for understanding cellular functions, uncovering disease mechanisms, and identifying potential drug targets.
In vivo cross-linking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) has emerged as a powerful technique to study protein complexes in living cells. However, during the enrichment of cross-linked peptides, complicated steps cause considerable sample loss, which limits the analysis of limited samples and hampers the reproducibility in quantitative analysis.
In a study published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a team led by Prof. Zhang Lihua from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a novel dimethylpiperidine-based cross-linker that enables one-step enrichment and quantitative analysis of protein complexes.
Using dimethylpiperidine as the enrichment handle, the researchers designed a cross-linker, 2,6-dimethylpiperidine disuccinimidyl tridecanoate (DPST). DPST exhibited cell membrane permeability, enrichment capability, and quantitative functionality.
By leveraging tandem mass tag antibodies, DPST enabled one-step enrichment and reversible elution of cross-linked peptides, eliminating sample loss from traditional multi-step processes. This allowed in vivo XL-MS analysis using as few as 10,000 cells.
Moreover, DPST supported light and heavy isotope labeling at the cellular level, and improved signal-to-noise ratio via MS2 quantitative reporter ions without increasing spectral complexity.
Using this novel cross-linker, researchers successfully mapped the protein interaction network in primary neurons derived from a single-embryo mouse. They also achieved quantitative detection of transient and weak interactions within dynamic liquid-liquid phase separation environments.
“By addressing key limitations in in vivo cross-linking proteomics, DPST provides a powerful solution for both qualitative and quantitative XL-MS analysis, with strong potential to drive advances in biomedical research and drug discovery,” said Prof. Zhang.
Companies building next-generation products and breakthrough technologies are often limited by the physical constraints of traditional materials. In aerospace, defense, energy, and industrial tooling, pushing those constraints introduces possible failure points into the system, but companies don’t have better options, given that producing new materials at scale involves multiyear timelines and huge expenses.
Foundation Alloy wants to break the mold. The company, founded by a team from MIT, is capable of producing a new class of ultra-high-performance metal alloys using a novel production process that doesn’t rely on melting raw materials. The company’s solid-state metallurgy technology, which simplifies the development and manufacturing of next-generation alloys, was developed over many years of research by former MIT professor Chris Schuh and collaborators.
“This is an entirely new approach to making metals,” says CEO Jake Guglin MBA ’19, who co-founded Foundation Alloy with Schuh, Jasper Lienhard ’15, Ph.D. ’22, and Tim Rupert Ph.D. ’11. “It gives us a broad set of rules on the materials engineering side that allows us to design a lot of different compositions with previously unattainable properties. We use that to make products that work better for advanced industrial applications.”
Foundation Alloy says its metal alloys can be made twice as strong as traditional metals, with 10 times faster product development, allowing companies to test, iterate, and deploy new metals into products in months instead of years.
The company is already designing metals and shipping demonstration parts to companies manufacturing components for things like planes, bikes, and cars. It’s also making test parts for partners in industries with longer development cycles, such as defense and aerospace.
Moving forward, the company believes its approach enables companies to build higher-performing, more reliable systems, from rockets to cars, nuclear fusion reactors, and artificial intelligence chips.
“For advanced systems like rocket and jet engines, if you can run them hotter, you can get more efficient use of fuel and a more powerful system,” Guglin says. “The limiting factor is whether or not you have structural integrity at those higher temperatures, and that is fundamentally a materials problem.
“Right now, we’re also doing a lot of work in advanced manufacturing and tooling, which is the unsexy but super critical backbone of the industrial world, where being able to push properties up without multiplying costs can unlock efficiencies in operations, performance, and capacity, all in a way that’s only possible with different materials.”
From MIT to the world
Schuh joined MIT’s faculty in 2002 to study the processing, structure, and properties of metal and other materials. He was named head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 2011 before becoming dean of engineering at Northwestern University in 2023, after more than 20 years at MIT.
“Chris wanted to look at metals from different perspectives and make things more economically efficient and higher performance than what’s possible with traditional processes,” Guglin says. “It wasn’t just for academic papers—it was about making new methods that would be valuable for the industrial world.”
Rupert and Lienhard conducted their Ph.D.s in Schuh’s lab, and Rupert invented complementary technologies to the solid-state processes developed by Schuh and his collaborators as a professor at the University of California at Irvine.
Guglin came to MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2017 eager to work with high-impact technologies.
“I wanted to go somewhere where I could find the types of fundamental technological breakthroughs that create asymmetric value—the types of things where if they didn’t happen here, they weren’t going to happen anywhere else,” Guglin recalls.
In one of his classes, a Ph.D. student in Schuh’s lab practiced his thesis defense by describing his research on a new way to create metal alloys.
“I didn’t understand any of it—I have a philosophy background,” Guglin says. “But I heard ‘stronger metals’ and I saw the potential of this incredible platform Chris’s lab was working on, and it tied into exactly why I wanted to come to MIT.”
Guglin connected with Schuh, and the pair stayed in touch over the next several years as Guglin graduated and went to work for aerospace companies SpaceX and Blue Origin, where he saw firsthand the problems being caused by the metal parts supply chain.
In 2022, the pair finally decided to launch a company, adding Rupert and Lienhard and licensing technology from MIT and UC Irvine.
The founders’ first challenge was scaling up the technology.
“There’s a lot of process engineering to go from doing something once at 5 grams to doing it 100 times a week at 100 kilograms per batch,” Guglin says.
Today, Foundation Alloys starts with its customers’ material requirements and decides on a precise mixture of the powdered raw materials that every metal starts out as. From there, it uses a specialized industrial mixer—Guglin calls it an industrial KitchenAid blender—to create a metal powder that is homogeneous down to the atomic level.
“In our process, from raw material all the way through to the final part, we never melt the metal,” Guglin says. “That is uncommon if not unknown in traditional metal manufacturing.
From there, the company’s material can be solidified using traditional methods like metal injection molding, pressing, or 3D printing. The final step is sintering in a furnace.
“We also do a lot of work around how the metal reacts in the sintering furnace,” Guglin says. “Our materials are specifically designed to sinter at relatively low temperatures, relatively quickly, and all the way to full density.”
The advanced sintering process uses an order of magnitude less heat, saving on costs while allowing the company to forgo secondary processes for quality control. It also gives Foundation Alloy more control over the microstructure of the final parts.
“That’s where we get a lot of our performance boost from,” Guglin says. “And by not needing those secondary processing steps, we’re saving days if not weeks in addition to the costs and energy savings.”
A foundation for industry
Foundation Alloy is currently piloting their metals across the industrial base and has also received grants to develop parts for critical components of nuclear fusion reactors.
“The name Foundation Alloy in a lot of ways came from wanting to be the foundation for the next generation of industry,” Guglin says.
Unlike in traditional metals manufacturing, where new alloys require huge investments to scale, Guglin says the company’s process for developing new alloys is nearly the same as its production processes, allowing it to scale new materials production far more quickly.
“At the core of our approach is looking at problems like material scientists with a new technology,” Guglin says. “We’re not beholden to the idea that this type of steel must solve this type of problem. We try to understand why that steel is failing and then use our technology to solve the problem in a way that produces not a 10% improvement, but a two- or five-times improvement in terms of performance.”
Wet wastes, including food waste and biomass, are promising candidates for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production due to their triglyceride content, which can be converted into biocrude via hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL).
SAF precursors must meet criteria derived from conventional fuels (e.g., Jet A), including complete oxygen removal to prevent jet engine corrosion and a higher heating value (HHV) close to Jet A. Currently, no HTL-derived biocrude meets these.
A new study, with contributions from researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), has explored using zeolite-supported molybdenum carbide (Mo2C) nanocatalysts to upgrade wet waste-derived biocrudes into SAF precursors that meet all essential criteria for the first time.
The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.
Mo2C nanocatalysts were generated in the gas phase and dispersed onto zeolite, tested for their ability to remove oxygen from biocrudes, then used to upgrade wet waste-derived biocrude to SAF via HTL. The upgraded biocrudes were characterized against Federal Aviation Administration specifications.
The data showed complete oxygen removal from the biocrude and a high heating value of 46.5 MJ/kg, comparable to Jet A. Prescreening tests showed the average carbon number of the upgraded biocrude’s distilled SAF fraction was 10.6, close to 11.4 for average conventional jet fuel, and it satisfied all key SAF prescreening standard specifications, including surface tension, density, viscosity, flash point, and freezing point. The metal carbide nanocatalysts were reusable in upgrading tests multiple times and retained their deoxygenation activity.
This work demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of catalytically upgrading wet waste-derived biocrudes into SAF precursors using zeolite-supported Mo2C nanocatalyst.
Enzymatic recycling has gained traction in recent years as a greener alternative to traditional plastic recycling techniques, which often rely on energy-intensive mechanical or chemical processes. Enzymes can selectively break down polymers like PET—commonly found in bottles and food packaging—into their basic building blocks.
In this new study, scientists have introduced an innovative strategy to trap these enzymes within nanoscale protein compartments produced naturally by bacteria, simplifying their use and extending their functional lifespan. The work is published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
One of the major barriers to industrial enzymatic recycling is the cost and complexity of producing and recovering the enzymes. Traditional immobilization methods involve multiple steps, including enzyme purification and attachment to solid carriers.
The system developed by the research team overcomes this by embedding the enzyme directly inside nanospheres during its expression in E. coli, using a single-step process that combines production, immobilization, and stabilization. This dramatically reduces costs and enhances reusability.
The technology builds on IC-Tagging, developed by Prof. José Manuel Martínez Costas and his group at CiQUS. It uses a viral protein, muNS-Mi, which self-assembles into nanostructures within bacterial cells.
Enzymes tagged with a short IC-sequence are spontaneously recruited into these compartments, resulting in fully functional, immobilized enzymes straight from the host cell—no chromatography or additional carriers needed. While IC-Tagging has previously been used for other biocatalysts, this is the first time it has been applied to a high-performance PET hydrolase.Credit: CiQUS
The team used a genetically optimized version of the LCC enzyme, known for its high efficiency in PET degradation. Their system successfully broke down real post-consumer plastic samples—including food trays and lab packaging—achieving over 90% depolymerization in under 72 hours. Moreover, the same batch of enzyme could be reused for two consecutive reactions with minimal loss of activity.
“These results go beyond what has been achieved so far with immobilized enzymes at lab scale,” says Adrián López Teijeiro, first author of the study. “Our system offers a powerful tool to support the industrial deployment of enzyme-based PET recycling and advance the circular economy for plastics.”
The work is part of the PETzyme project and coordinated by Gemma Eibes (CRETUS) and José Martínez Costas (CiQUS). The team is currently working to scale up the method and explore its potential with other industrially relevant enzymes in areas such as biocatalysis, waste processing and sustainable materials.
A new study led by Colorado State University Distinguished Professor Eugene Chen outlines a path to creating advanced, recyclable plastics. Published in Nature, the study describes a breakthrough method for upconverting a natural polymer that is usually made by microorganisms into a wide range of new and more sustainable high-performance materials as well as valuable chiral small molecules for organic and polymer synthesis.
The method is an important step toward a circular materials economy in which products are designed to be bio-based, reused, repurposed or recycled rather than ending up in landfills—greatly reducing the burden of chemicals and plastics on the environment.
The study centers on the innovative utilization of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) or P3HB—a biodegradable polyester produced by microbes. P3HB belongs to a family of materials called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), which can be redesigned to perform similarly to petroleum-based plastics but with one key advantage: they can break down naturally in soil and oceans.
Although researchers have explored modifying PHAs before, the potential has been limited because only one version of the macromolecule is found in nature. That natural form comes with fixed traits, such as a specific melting temperature, strength and flexibility. To address this, Chen’s team developed a catalytic process that changes the molecule’s “handedness.”
In chemistry, that term refers to enantiomers—molecules that are mirror images of each other, like your left and right hands. Just like a left shoe won’t fit your right foot, the two forms of a molecule can behave very differently. When enantiomeric molecules are covalently linked to form a macromolecule or a polymer, many different versions of PHAs can then be produced.
By unlocking these different versions—and related 3D forms known as stereoisomers—Chen’s team has opened the door to a new generation of customizable materials with properties tailored for different applications. For example, one version of a new macromolecule could provide extra flexibility while another could provide high dimensional rigidity for totally different applications.
“The new PHA polymers we have unlocked using natural P3HB as the starting material exhibit improved properties for potential use in packaging, medical products or adhesives,” Chen said. “They can also be chemically broken down and recycled into smaller chiral molecules with specific three-dimensional shapes that are useful in making medicines, new plastics and other valuable compounds.”
This work builds on years of research in Chen’s group on understanding and improving P3HB performance properties as a versatile biodegradable material.
In earlier work published in Science, his team showed that by changing the microstructure of synthetic P3HB, they could make it stick to surfaces more strongly than commercial superglues.
The current study flips the approach: instead of making synthetic P3HB from scratch, the team starts with natural P3HB and catalytically transforms it into new PHA materials with enhanced performance and recyclability.
A new blue fluorescent molecule set new top emission efficiencies in both solid and liquid states, according to a University of Michigan-led study that could pave the way for applications in technology and medicine.
Able to absorb light and emit it at lower energy levels, fluorescent molecules called fluorophores glow in OLED displays and help doctors and scientists figure out what’s happening in cells and tissues. They need to be solid in displays and many sensing applications, but liquids are typically preferred for biological uses. Most fluorophores don’t work well in both forms, but this one does.
The study, “Elucidating the molecular structural origin of efficient emission across solid and solution phases of single benzene fluorophores,” is published in the journal Nature Communications.
“The fluorescent material reached record-breaking brightness and efficiency with 98% quantum efficiency in the solid state and 94% in solution,” said Jinsang Kim, the Raoul Kopelman Collegiate Professor of Science and Engineering in the U-M Department of Materials Science and Engineering who led the study.
Often, engineers designing fluorophores start in solution, exploring the optical properties of individual molecules, but run into problems in their solid-state applications when fluorophore molecules contact each other.
“Fluorophores behave very differently in the solid state, which then requires more rational molecular engineering effort for structural modification,” Kim said. “By investigating and establishing a molecular design principle to make fluorophores that are bright both in solution and solid states, we have reduced development time and cost for various future applications.”
The initial discovery of the versatile fluorophore—called TGlu for short—was unexpected for lead author Jung-Moo Heo, U-M postdoctoral research fellow of materials science and engineering.
“TGlu was an intermediate step for another chemical design, but during purification I found it was surprisingly highly emissive, not only in solution but also in solid state,” Heo said.
The discovery led to the systematic study to establish the optimal design. The result was a simple design: a single benzene ring core—six carbon atoms joined in a hexagon. The researchers positioned two groups that give away electrons, called donor groups, across the ring from one another. Next to the donors, they placed two acceptor groups, which withdraw electrons, across the ring from one another.
“This so-called quadrupolar structure symmetrically distributes charge across the molecule, providing stable emission in various environments,” Heo said.
Because the ring has only six points, donor and acceptor groups are positioned next to each other. This spatial arrangement reduces the energy gap compared to other similar molecules within a compact framework, which means the fluorophore needs a relatively small amount of energy to move an electron from the ground state to an excited state—similar to jumping up a rung on a ladder.
However, the molecule’s small size means overall conjugation length remains limited—meaning electrons cannot spread out too far across the molecule. This keeps the absolute energy gap—the distance between ladder rungs—wide enough to emit blue light instead of shifting towards narrower energy gap colors like red.
Typically, small band gaps come with an efficiency drawback. When in the excited state on the higher rung of the ladder, an electron can either emit light as it comes back down to the ground state or lose energy as heat through vibration.
Often, small band gaps mean more heat loss, reducing the quantum yield—an efficiency metric expressed as the percentage of absorbed UV light that gets reemitted as visible light relative to the amount lost as heat.
After trying a series of acceptor groups, the researchers found one that stabilizes the excited state. Even with the small band gap, this acceptor group prevents heat loss by restricting access to what are known as conical intersections, which function as “exit doors” for energy leakage. This unexpected behavior, called an Inverted Energy Gap Law, was confirmed both by experiments and quantum chemical simulations.
In the solid state, the acceptor groups, which were intentionally designed to be bulky, prevent the molecules from getting too close to one another, which causes fluorophores to lose brightness as energy escapes as heat instead of light, a phenomenon known as quenching.
The small, highly-efficient fluorophore is simple to produce—only requiring three steps—which increases its scalability while reducing production costs.
The current TGlu design fluoresces blue light. As a next step, the researchers will adjust the band gap, and thus the color. Further, while a high quantum yield from light excitation is promising, device performance under electrical excitation requires separate testing due to additional loss mechanisms.
Heo also plans to work towards a phosphorescent version of the molecule, as phosphors are overall more energy-efficient than fluorophores, for use in display technology.
The Autonomous University of Madrid, University of Valencia, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and Seoul National University also contributed to this research.
For the first time, chemists have discovered a unique way to control and modify a type of compound widely used in medicines, including a drug used to treat breast cancer.
The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature, also found a new mechanism associated with the chemical reaction that enables the shape of the compound to be flipped from being right-handed to left-handed by simply adding a common agent to the chemical reaction.
Study lead author Varinder Aggarwal, professor of synthetic chemistry at the University of Bristol, said, “The findings change our understanding of the fundamental chemistry of this group of organic molecules. It presents exciting implications because the science allows us to make alternatives to the drug tamoxifen, with potentially greater potency and fewer unwanted side effects.”
While most alkenes are easy to prepare, a specific type with four different parts—called tetrasubstituted alkenes—is much more challenging, but used to make cancer-fighting medicines and natural products like essential oils.
So the research team aimed to find a more efficient method of making tetrasubstituted alkenes, including tamoxifen, which allows them to be easily manipulated and adapted into different forms.
The new method offers a highly versatile solution to building complex tetrasubstituted alkenes from simple building blocks.
Aggarwal explained, “Our original design plan used organic boronic esters as the key ingredient but that resulted in unstable intermediates, so it didn’t work.
“We then tried a less common form of boron-containing molecules, namely boranes, and that’s when the clever molecular gymnastics became possible. This new boron system enabled the installation of different groups on the alkene in a controlled manner from very simple building blocks, like Lego.
“It’s so exciting because it holds the key to finding even better drug molecules—like alternatives to tamoxifen—with more of the properties you want and less of what is undesirable, such as side effects.”
The scientists enlisted the help of computational chemists at Colorado State University to map exactly what was happening. That led to the full extent of their discovery being uncovered.
Co-author Robert Paton, professor of chemistry at Colorado State University, said, “The mechanism showed that by just changing the reaction conditions through adding an agent, the geometry of the alkene can switch direction from left to right. This was surprising and hadn’t been seen before.”
In addition to drug molecules like tamoxifen, the researchers also worked with natural products such as γ-bisabolene, a fragrant compound found in essential oils, to demonstrate the broad applications of their breakthrough.
Aggarwal added, “Now that we have struck upon an effective, flexible methodology, it allows us to swap in other molecules, so the potential here is wide-reaching for both drug discovery and materials science.”
Many modern devices—from cellphones and computers to electric vehicles and wind turbines—rely on strong magnets made from types of minerals called rare earths. As the systems and infrastructure used in daily life have turned digital and the United States has moved toward renewable energy, accessing these minerals has become critical—and the markets for these elements have grown rapidly.
Modern society now uses rare earth magnets in everything from national defense, where magnet-based systems are integral to missile guidance and aircraft, to the clean energy transition, which depends on wind turbines and electric vehicles.
The rapid growth of the rare earth metal trade and its effects on society isn’t the only case study of its kind. Throughout history, materials have quietly shaped the trajectory of human civilization. They form the tools people use, the buildings they inhabit, the devices that mediate their relationships and the systems that structure economies. Newly discovered materials can set off ripple effects that shape industries, shift geopolitical balances and transform people’s daily habits.
Materials science is the study of the atomic structure, properties, processing and performance of materials. In many ways, materials science is a discipline of immense social consequence.
As a materials scientist, I’m interested in what can happen when new materials become available. Glass, steel and rare earth magnets are all examples of how innovation in materials science has driven technological change and, as a result, shaped global economies, politics and the environment.
Glass lenses and the scientific revolution In the early 13th century, after the sacking of Constantinople, some excellent Byzantine glassmakers left their homes to settle in Venice—at the time a powerful economic and political center. The local nobility welcomed the glassmakers’ beautiful wares. However, to prevent the glass furnaces from causing fires, the nobles exiled the glassmakers—under penalty of death—to the island of Murano.
Murano became a center for glass craftsmanship. In the 15th century, the glassmaker Angelo Barovier experimented with adding the ash from burned plants, which contained a chemical substance called potash, to the glass.
The potash reduced the melting temperature and made liquid glass more fluid. It also eliminated bubbles in the glass and improved optical clarity. This transparent glass was later used in magnifying lenses and spectacles.
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, completed in 1455, made reading more accessible to people across Europe. With it came a need for reading glasses, which grew popular among scholars, merchants and clergy—enough that spectacle-making became an established profession.
By the early 17th century, glass lenses evolved into compound optical devices. Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope toward celestial bodies, while Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered microbial life with a microscope.
Lens-based instruments have been transformative. Telescopes have redefined long-standing cosmological views. Microscopes have opened entirely new fields in biology and medicine.
These changes marked the dawn of empirical science, where observation and measurement drove the creation of knowledge. Today, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory continue those early telescopes’ legacies of knowledge creation.
Steel and empires In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution created demand for stronger, more reliable materials for machines, railroads, ships and infrastructure. The material that emerged was steel, which is strong, durable and cheap. Steel is a mixture of mostly iron, with small amounts of carbon and other elements added.
Countries with large-scale steel manufacturing once had outsized economic and political power and influence over geopolitical decisions. For example, the British Parliament intended to prevent the colonies from exporting finished steel with the iron act of 1750. They wanted the colonies’ raw iron as supply for their steel industry in England.
Benjamin Huntsman invented a smelting process using 3-foot-tall ceramic vessels, called crucibles, in 18th-century Sheffield. Huntsman’s crucible process produced higher-quality steel for tools and weapons.
One hundred years later, Henry Bessemer developed the oxygen-blowing steelmaking process, which drastically increased production speed and lowered costs. In the United States, figures such as Andrew Carnegie created a vast industry based on Bessemer’s process.
The widespread availability of steel transformed how societies built, traveled and defended themselves. Skyscrapers and transit systems made of steel allowed cities to grow, steel-built battleships and tanks empowered militaries, and cars containing steel became staples in consumer life.
Control over steel resources and infrastructure made steel a foundation of national power. China’s 21st-century rise to steel dominance is a continuation of this pattern. From 1995 to 2015, China’s contribution to the world steel production increased from about 10% to more than 50%. The White House responded in 2018 with massive tariffs on Chinese steel.
Rare earth metals and global trade Early in the 21st century, the advance of digital technologies and the transition to an economy based on renewable energies created a demand for rare earth elements.
Rare earth elements are 17 chemically very similar elements, including neodymium, dysprosium, samarium and others. They occur in nature in bundles and are the ingredients that make magnets super strong and useful. They are necessary for highly efficient electric motors, wind turbines and electronic devices.
Because of their chemical similarity, separating and purifying rare earth elements involves complex and expensive processes.
China controls the majority of global rare earth processing capacity. Political tensions between countries, especially around trade tariffs and strategic competition, can risk shortages or disruptions in the supply chain.
The rare earth metals case illustrates how a single category of materials can shape trade policy, industrial planning and even diplomatic alliances.
Technological transformation begins with societal pressure. New materials create opportunities for scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Once a material proves useful, it quickly becomes woven into the fabric of daily life and broader systems. With each innovation, the material world subtly reorganizes the social world—redefining what is possible, desirable and normal.
Understanding how societies respond to new innovations in materials science can help today’s engineers and scientists solve crises in sustainability and security. Every technical decision is, in some ways, a cultural one, and every material has a story that extends far beyond its molecular structure.
Oxygen evolution is considered one of the most energy-intensive steps in water electrolysis and is therefore a key factor for more efficient green hydrogen production. Modeling of the reaction mechanisms has so far been based on the assumption that the elementary steps take place sequentially and not in a concerted manner.
A team led by Prof. Dr. Kai S. Exner from the University of Duisburg-Essen has now shown that this assumption is not always correct. The results, published in Nature Communications, open up new possibilities for improving solid catalysts for energy conversion and storage applications.
There are two basic types of catalysis: homogeneous catalysts have the same physical state as the substances being converted (e.g., they all are liquid), while heterogeneous catalysts are in a different phase, for example a solid that reacts with liquids or gases. For a reaction to take place on the surface of a solid catalyst, the starting materials (reactants) must attach to its surface (adsorption) and then dissolve again after the reaction has taken place (desorption).
Until now, research into solid catalysts—i.e., the heterogeneous variant—has assumed that adsorption and desorption occur sequentially: the reactant binds to the catalyst, reacts, and then the product dissolves. In homogeneous catalysis, however, it is known that these steps take place simultaneously.
When modeling reaction mechanisms in heterogeneous catalysis, possible simultaneous elementary steps have not always been taken into account.
However, a theoretical study within the RESOLV Cluster of Excellence now shows that the solid iridium dioxide (IrO₂), which is used as an anode material for the production of green hydrogen, behaves similarly to a homogeneous catalyst with regard to oxygen evolution: Oxygen is produced in a “Walden-like mechanism” in which adsorption and desorption occur in a concerted manner, analogous to homogeneous variants.
This contradicts previous ideas and opens up new possibilities for improving solid catalysts that are more closely aligned with the principles of homogeneous processes in solution.
Exner’s research builds on several joint projects within the University of Duisburg Essen and the University Alliance Ruhr: the Natural Water to Hydrogen project headed by Prof. Dr. Corina Andronescu, the Collaborative Research Center 247 Heterogeneous Oxidation Catalysis in the Liquid Phase and, last but not least, the research in the new Active Sites building.
