Over a feverish 10-day period in 1985, scientists conceived of a new molecule of perfect symmetry — and named it after one of the 20th century’s most famous inventors and futurists.
The hunt started in the 1970s when Harry Kroto, a lab chemist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., was puzzling over the discovery of a primordial soup of organic molecules in the “vast dark clouds that lie between the stars,” Kroto said in his Nobel Prize speech.
MIT researchers have developed a lightweight polymer film that is nearly impenetrable to gas molecules, raising the possibility that it could be used as a protective coating to prevent solar cells and other infrastructure from corrosion, and to slow the aging of packaged food and medicines.
The polymer, which can be applied as a film mere nanometers thick, completely repels nitrogen and other gases, as far as can be detected by laboratory equipment, the researchers found. That degree of impermeability has never been seen before in any polymer, and rivals the impermeability of molecularly-thin crystalline materials such as graphene.
“Our polymer is quite unusual. It’s obviously produced from a solution-phase polymerization reaction, but the product behaves like graphene, which is gas-impermeable because it’s a perfect crystal. However, when you examine this material, one would never confuse it with a perfect crystal,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
TAYLOR, Texas (ABJ) — A Dallas-based developer is proposing to turn a 220-acre parcel directly northeast of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s rising factory in Taylor into a data center campus.
KDC will be considered by the Taylor Planning and Zoning Commission on Nov. 12 for an employment center plan for the site at 1,051 County Road 401 for what it’s calling “Project Comal.” Details are minimal, but it would have primary data center uses along with a small lot of space for commercial, civic and other uses, according to city documents.
KDC representatives declined to comment.
This pace of discovery might be expected given the extreme intricacy of the brain and psychiatric disorders.
“The brain is incredibly complex — we’re talking about tens of billions of neurons with trillions of connections,” says Kozo Kaibuchi, director of the International Center for Brain Science (ICBS) at Fujita Health University, near Nagoya in Japan. “Psychiatric and neurological disorders are also highly diverse — often involving subtle changes on a spectrum rather than one obvious cause.”
On top of that, there are further obstacles that hinder progress in developing treatments for these conditions — the difficulty of imaging inside the human brain; the scarcity of human-like models; and the blood–brain barrier, which prevents most drugs from entering the brain.
Hubert, T., Mehta, R., Sartran, L. et al. Olympiad-level formal mathematical reasoning with reinforcement learning. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09833-y.
