Army chemists study new kind of molecule

Imagine a future in which a chemical attack on a Middle Eastern village in the dead of night has no effect on the people in its path. They are sleeping soundly in tents embedded with protective filtration material that prevents any harm. The village elders, who come out to investigate, have that same material in the headscarves they wear over their faces as they walk about with chemicals lingering in the air.

That day is coming closer. Two U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center scientists, Greg Peterson and Jared DeCoste, are working with chemists at Northwestern University to make it a reality.

For the past eight years, Peterson and DeCoste have been steadily refining and improving a recently developed class of chemical compounds known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. Chemists make them in a laboratory using organic struts and metallic nodes, much like an erector set, creating void spaces for chemical warfare agent, or CWA, or toxic industrial compound, or TIC, molecules to enter.

 http://www.army.mil/article/151839/Army_chemists_study_new_kind_of_molecule/