Japanese scientist Susumu Kitagawa, who shared this year’s chemistry Nobel prize with two other researchers abroad, would not have come up with an idea for a new kind of material with numerous applications had it not been for hours of downtime at his alma mater Kyoto University in 1989.
Kitagawa, who was a Kindai University researcher at the time, was analyzing the structure of a new crystal using a supercomputer at Kyoto University. But it took time for the device to crunch out results, as it was shared by many researchers and was processing huge volumes of data.
While waiting idly for the results to come out, he discussed with two student researchers the possible structure of the material being analyzed. That’s when he noticed that it had countless tiny pores inside.
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