Rare earths, rescued by a molecule that builds itself: Maryland's inventions of the year

The metals inside every phone and wind turbine are notoriously hard to separate from the ore and waste they hide in. University of Maryland chemists Mercedes Taylor and Michael Baptiste designed a molecule that solves it elegantly — it assembles itself around rare-earth ions, selectively grabbing and separating them from complex mixtures. The work was named a 2026 Invention of the Year at Innovate Maryland, alongside a 'computing with light' photonic architecture from the university's physicists that aims to make AI hardware faster and thriftier with energy. Cleaner ways to recover the metals of the energy transition, invented in a public university lab — that is the pipeline working as it should.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation