Director's Message:

Happy Spring!

I have to admit I was having a bit of writer's block in getting this message started for the spring newsletter - possibly because I just finished off a larger than normal portion of leftover pasta for lunch! So with all the recent buzz about ChatGPT, I asked it "Why should companies pay attention to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering?" - secretly hoping that perhaps it might provide a different angle from my usual perspective. The response, given in seconds, is below:

"There are several reasons why companies should pay attention to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago:

Overall, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering is a leading institution for molecular engineering with a focus on interdisciplinary research and sustainability. Companies that are interested in developing new materials, technologies, and approaches to addressing complex challenges may find opportunities for collaboration and innovation with the school."

While this is all true, it provides a reasonably good introduction to this newsletter - and unfortunately no deep new insights, however I want add a few more points -

Environment fate of materials and sustainability

Sensing technology and sustainability

Polymer circularity

Resource recovery

Critical material supply chain

Green batteries

Critical materials life cycle analysis

AI/Machine Learning applied to sustainability

Carbon capture

Solar Technology

Imagine a thin, digital display so flexible that you can wrap it around your wrist, fold it in any direction, or curve it over your car’s steering wheel. Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago have designed just such a material, which can bend in half or stretch to more than twice its original length while still emitting a fluorescent pattern.

The material, described in Nature Materials, has a wide range of applications, from wearable electronics and health sensors to foldable computer screens.

“One of the most important components of nearly every consumer electronic we use today is a display, and we’ve combined knowledge from many different fields to create an entirely new display technology,” said Sihong Wang, assistant professor of molecular engineering, who led the research with Juan de Pablo, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering.

University of Chicago chemist Chuan He has been awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in chemistry for his pioneering discovery of reversible RNA methylation and its role in gene expression.

Awarded by the Israeli-based Wolf Foundation, the annual prize honors the greatest achievements in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, physics, medicine and the arts. The award was established in 1978 and carries a $100,000 prize.

He, the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was the first to champion the idea that modifications to RNA are reversible and can control gene expression. His groundbreaking studies helped open a new field in biology known as epitranscriptomics.

He shared the 2023 prize, announced Feb. 7, with Hiroaki Suga of the University of Tokyo and Jeffrey W. Kelly of the Scripps Research Institute.

In its announcement, the foundation cited the three chemists' “pioneering discoveries that illuminate the functions and pathological dysfunctions of RNA and proteins, and for creating strategies to harness the capabilities of biopolymers in new ways to ameliorate human disease.”

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have designed a chameleon-like building material that changes its infrared color—and how much heat it absorbs or emits—based on the outside temperature. On hot days, the material can emit up to 92 percent of the infrared heat it contains, helping cool the inside of a building. On colder days, however, the material emits just 7 percent of its infrared, helping keep a building warm.

“We’ve essentially figured out a low-energy way to treat a building like a person; you add a layer when you’re cold and take off a layer when you’re hot,” said Asst. Prof. Po-Chun Hsu, who led the research published in Nature Sustainability. “This kind of smart material lets us maintain the temperature in a building without huge amounts of energy.”

Those “Aha!” moments when unrelated ideas merge into a fantastic new insight do happen in science. And they’re not so rare in the interdisciplinary air at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), an institution formally affiliated with the University of Chicago.

Case in point: Such a moment arose during a casual conversation between bioengineer Jeffrey Hubbell and neurobiologist Joshua Rosenthal in 2018. Hubbell was in Woods Hole, Massachusetts meeting MBL scientists, including Rosenthal, on the occasion of being named the inaugural Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME).

As Hubbell and Rosenthal chatted, talk turned to their research interests, which on the surface seemed dissimilar. But today, the two scientists are deep into a collaboration to improve the efficiency of immunotherapies to treat cancer (the focus of Hubbell’s lab) using directed RNA editing, a technology pioneered by Rosenthal’s lab. They’ve filed for a patent on their approach, and are collecting data to explore its potential for clinical translation.

“It’s exciting, looking forward,” said Rosenthal. “If this approach keeps showing as efficacious and it works on several tumor models, it may be fertile grounds for starting a biotech [company].”

Ironically, a “failed” experiment in Rosenthal’s lab inspired the idea of applying RNA editing to immunotherapies.

A new tool developed by researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) can help reveal the origin of electronic states in designed materials—a step toward harnessing the materials for future quantum technology applications.

The tool, developed by Asst. Prof. Shuolong Yang and his team, will help researchers better understand magnetic topological insulators: materials with special surface features that could make them integral to quantum information science technologies.

Through a technique called layer-encoded frequency-domain photoemission, researchers send two laser pulses into a layered material. The resulting vibrations, coupled with the measurement of energy, allows researchers to piece together a “movie” that shows how electrons move in each layer.

“In our daily life, when we want to better understand a material — to understand its composition or if it’s hollow — we knock on it,” Yang said. “This is a similar approach at a microscopic level. Our new technique allows us to ‘knock and listen’ to layered materials, and it allowed us to show that one particular magnetic topological insulator works differently than theory predicts.”

The results were published in Nature Physics.

The Chicago biomedical lab funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is coming to Fulton Market.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago is leasing 25,698 square feet in the Fulton Labs building at 1375 W. Fulton St. The biohub, announced earlier this month, received a $250 million commitment from Chan Zuckerberg and is expected to be home to 30 to 50 researchers and other staff.

The Chicago lab, a joint effort between the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was selected over 58 other groups nationwide. It’s designed to attract researchers who will take on risky moonshots in biology, tackling cures for diseases by mapping the human body at the cellular level.

Successes include record-breaking network extension, inclusive research fellowships, and additions to quantum economy

The Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) continued to expand its diverse community of quantum researchers, leaders, and institutions in 2022—launching a quantum research fellowship for undergraduates, welcoming 11 new corporate partners, and extending a regional quantum communication network to a total length of 124 miles.

These are among the successes highlighted in the CQE’s newly published annual report, which chronicles the many contributions of the consortium’s members and partners and offers a window into the region’s continuing shift from local quantum powerhouse to national quantum economy.

A thin film can switch from releasing heat to trapping it, and wrapping the coating around buildings could make them more energy-efficient

Keeping indoor spaces comfortable takes a lot of power. About half the energy Americans use in their homes goes toward heating and cooling, accounting for a sizable chunk of both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions. Although many buildings have walls packed with insulation to maintain an ideal temperature, others—especially old buildings—are shockingly energy inefficient.

Scientists have been working on higher-tech solutions to this problem for decades. Now materials scientists have developed a color-changing film that can switch between heating and cooling modes. The film, which is thinner than a credit card, operates on very little energy and could one day envelop even the most wasteful of buildings to help radiate unwanted heat in the summer and trap it in during the winter. The findings were published recently in Nature Sustainability.

“It is a really impressive result,” says Yao Zhai, a mechanical engineer at the University of Missouri, who was not involved in the research.

If you know the atoms that compose a particular molecule or solid material, the interactions between those atoms can be determined computationally, by solving quantum mechanical equations—at least, if the molecule is small and simple. However, solving these equations, critical for fields from materials engineering to drug design, requires a prohibitively long computational time for complex molecules and materials.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) and Department of Chemistry have explored the possibility of solving these electronic structures using a quantum computer. The research, which uses a combination of new computational approaches was published online in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.

I am an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. I am a materials scientist and solid-state physicist who specializes in the fabrication and characterization of novel quantum materials and structures. In particular, my laboratory has been producing atomically thin materials for future quantum technologies, including topological quantum computing.

Adjuvants—ingredients that help boost the immune response in vaccines—have been used in vaccines for decades. But inducing a stronger immune response can result in more unwanted side effects, like swelling at the injection site or fever and body aches.

Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) researchers have found that adding small molecules called immunomodulators to vaccine adjuvants gives them the ability to better regulate the body’s response to vaccines.

In a mouse model, adding immunomodulators to a flu vaccine increased antibody response, and adding them to a typhoid vaccine reduced inflammation.

“If you think of adjuvants as a megaphone that stimulates the immune system, then you can think of immunomodulators as a sound mixer,” said Jeremiah Kim, a graduate student and co-lead author of the paper. “We’re able to selectively tune the immune response to reduce negative side effects.”

The Geospatial Energy Mapper (GEM) is a comprehensive, interactive online mapping tool that can help identify areas across the country that are suitable for wind, solar and more. First publicly launched in 2013 as the Energy Zones Mapping Tool (EZMT), GEM has been redesigned, rebranded and reengineered. GEM is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory with funding from the DOE’s Office of Electricity.

“In GEM we applied lessons learned from almost 10 years hosting the EZMT, including making it easier to learn and use, updating the software architecture, and choosing a name fitting its current scope of uses,” said Jim Kuiper, principal geospatial engineer and GEM technical coordinator.

GEM offers an extensive catalog of mapping data. This includes energy resources and infrastructure, and other information that might influence energy infrastructure siting decisions. With over 190 different mapping layers — including demographics, boundaries and utilities — users can locate areas for clean power generation, electric vehicle charging stations and more.

As the world grapples with the climate crisis and transition from fossil fuels to renewables, crops and clean energy are increasingly sharing the same land, and agrivoltaics — the growing of crops beneath the shade of solar panels — is expanding.

Now, scientists are looking into how to harness the sun’s light spectrum in a way that can improve the efficiency of agrivoltaic systems in areas with arid farmland.

In a new study, scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), discovered that the blue part of the light spectrum is more efficient for solar energy production, while the red part of the spectrum is better for plant growth, a press release from UC Davis said.

Hydrogen technology development is shifting towards low-emissions solutions such as electrolysis, according to a joint study of patents by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The report is the first of its kind and uses global patent data to provide comprehensive up-to-date analysis of innovation in all hydrogen technologies. It covers the full range of technologies, from hydrogen supply to storage, distribution and transformation, as well as end-use applications.

“Hydrogen from low-emissions sources can play an important role in clean energy transitions with potential to replace fossil fuels in industries where few clean alternatives exist, like long-haul transport and fertilizer production,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “This study shows that innovators are responding to the need for competitive hydrogen supply chains, but also identifies areas – particularly among end-users – where more effort is required. We will continue to help governments spur innovation for secure, resilient and sustainable clean energy technologies.”

Poster presentations at scientific conferences can provide early-career researchers with valuable opportunities to practice their communication skills, receive feedback on their research, and expand their network. “By discussing my work one-on-one with other researchers, [I’ve found] I can identify what worked well and what needs improvement,” says Aura Alonso-Rodríguez, a Ph.D. candidate in natural resources at the University of Vermont. “These conversations can also inspire new research ideas and can often lead to new collaborations.”

Yet, there are times when poster sessions don’t go as hoped. “I remember this one time that I worked for months on a poster—and only two people came to talk to me,” Alonso-Rodríguez recalls. “It was a bit disheartening.” She chalked up the lackluster turnout to the poster session’s placement at the end of the conference schedule, and she tried to focus on how valuable it was to prepare the poster in the first place. “Presenting that poster created the pressure that I needed to analyze my data and advance in my project. Through that experience, I learned that the work that goes into preparing a poster is just as valuable as the presentation itself.”

We won’t run out of key ingredients for climate action, but mining comes with social and environmental ramifications.

Powering the world with renewable energy will take a lot of raw materials. The good news is, when it comes to aluminum, steel, and rare-earth metals, there’s plenty to go around, according to a new analysis.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, world leaders set a goal to keep global warming under 1.5 °C, and reaching that target will require building a lot of new infrastructure. Even in the most ambitious scenarios, the world has enough materials to power the grid globally with renewables, the researchers found. And mining and processing those materials won’t produce enough emissions to warm the world past international targets.

There is a catch to all this good news. While we technically have enough of the materials we need to build renewable energy infrastructure, actually mining and processing them can be a challenge. If we don’t do it responsibly, getting those materials into usable form could lead to environmental harm or even human rights violations.

Just a year ago a global crunch in one metal looked likely to single-handedly derail the energy transition. Not only was cobalt, a crucial battery material, being dug up far too slowly to meet soaring demand, but the lion’s share of known reserves sat in Congo, a country rife with instability, corruption and child labour. Fast forward to today and the price of the blue metal, which had more than doubled between summer 2021 and spring 2022, to $82,000 a tonne, has collapsed to $35,000, not far from historic lows.

Despite probable bumps in the road ahead, caused by faltering economies and component shortages, more than 13m plug-in fully electric or hybrid passenger cars are likely to be sold this year, according to BloombergNEF. This will take the number of EVs on the world’s roads from 27m to more than 40m. But that is still only around 3% of the planet’s vehicle fleet. With another 97% to go, mass electrification of transport means there will be a huge demand for batteries and the materials they are made from.

Carmakers already fret about spiralling prices and limited supplies of lithium, the crucial ingredient of the lithium-ion batteries at the heart of this revolution. They also worry about cobalt and other ingredients used to make cathodes, the positive electrodes inside those batteries (though recent discoveries of new reserves have dampened those concerns as they relate to cobalt in particular). It does, though, take two to tango. For every cathode, a battery needs an anode, a negative electrode. Anodes are made from graphite, and a supply-shock for that material is brewing.

As demand for electric vehicles (EVs) continues to grow, many are concerned that we won’t be able to produce enough batteries to power these EVs. This concern stems from problems in today’s EV battery supply chain.

The term “supply chain” describes the process by which a product is made and delivered to a consumer. Problems in the EV battery supply chain can slow EV production, create higher costs, and ultimately slow adoption of this critical technology. To electrify transportation, this supply chain needs to be robust, sustainable, and affordable.

So much of modern life relies on GPS that it has been estimated that an outage would cost the U.S. economy over $1 billion per day. Such an outage isn’t too far-fetched. We have seen recent examples of GPS being blocked in conflict zones, spoofed for nefarious purposes and disrupted by solar storms. At its heart, GPS is a timing system. To understand how timing relates to navigation, and how quantum technology will enable us to overcome the limitations of GPS, we need to go back in history a few hundred years.

General Fusion is not alone. On February 10th Tokamak Energy, a British firm, announced plans for a quarter-scale prototype, the ST80, also at Culham. And in 2024 they will be joined there by Machine 4, a pre-commercial demonstrator from another British outfit, First Light Fusion.

Meanwhile, across the ocean in Massachusetts, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is already building, in Devens, a town west of Boston, a half-scale prototype called SPARC. On the other side of America, in Everett, Washington, Helion Energy is likewise constructing a prototype called Polaris. And in Foothill Ranch, a suburb of Los Angeles, TAE Technologies is similarly working on a machine it calls Copernicus.

A recent review study led by The University of Texas at Austin provides an overview of the planet's freshwater supplies and strategies for sustainably managing them.

Published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the study highlights the connections between surface and groundwater and calls for diversified strategies for managing them both.

"I like to emphasize a lot of solutions and how they can be optimized," said lead author Bridget Scanlon, a senior research scientist at the UT Bureau of Economic Geology, a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

The semiconductor industry is booming, with expected average annual growth of 6 to 8 percent through 2030 and yearly revenues forecasted to reach $1 trillion. The industry will have to double semiconductor production to keep pace with future demand, but most fabrication plants, commonly called fabs, are already operating at capacity. To increase supply, many companies have announced plans to build new fabs and some are already in the construction phase. And in a coordinated push to achieve a microelectronics resurgence, the United States is becoming a hot spot for fab construction.

When it comes to developing new ways to fabricate microchips, the best approach may be not to rely on either human- or computer-developed designs alone but instead a blending of the two. Such collaborations might reduce costs by half compared to depending on human experts alone, a new study finds.

“While humans are still essential due to their expertise and ability to solve challenging, out-of-the-box problems, our findings show where the ‘human first, computer last’ strategy can help address the tedious aspects of process development, thereby significantly speeding up innovation,” says study senior author Richard Gottscho, executive vice president and strategic advisor to the CEO at Lam Research Corp. in Fremont, Calif. “As chipmakers look to conquer the many challenges associated with scaling 3D NAND, FinFETS, DRAM and other devices, the implications are really exciting.”

Currently, one of the bottlenecks to building microchips is the growing cost of developing the semiconductor processes that fabricate transistors and memory cells. These complicated processes, each involving hundreds of steps, are still conceived manually by highly trained engineers.

Recent investigations like the one Dyer worked on have revealed that LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. They range from multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. New analyses suggest that for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.)

“The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” That sounds like the oath of environmentalists opposed to the use of fossil fuels. In fact, the prediction was made by Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a Saudi Arabian oil minister who shot to prominence as the face of the Arab oil embargo of 1973. He was convinced that innovations in alternative energy sources and fuels would ultimately loosen oil’s grip on the global economy.

There are two reasons to think change is coming. The first force is familiar: geopolitics. Five decades ago, it was the oiligopolists of the opec cartel who clumsily manipulated energy markets. This time Russia, an oil-and-gas powerhouse, has provided an ugly reminder of the dangers of relying on nasty authoritarian regimes. The second factor is rising anxiety about climate change. To avoid its worst effects, almost 200 countries have agreed to restrain emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs); many are already moving towards a decarbonised energy system. Those twin forces have redoubled efforts to phase out fossil fuels.

Deep below the ocean surface, the light fades into a twilight zone where whales and fish migrate and dead algae and zooplankton rain down from above. This is the heart of the ocean’s carbon pump, part of the natural ocean processes that capture about a third of all human-produced carbon dioxide and sink it into the deep sea, where it remains for hundreds of years.

There may be ways to enhance these processes so the ocean pulls more carbon out of the atmosphere to help slow climate change. Yet little is known about the consequences.

Peter de Menocal, a marine paleoclimatologist and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discussed ocean carbon dioxide removal at a recent TEDxBoston: Planetary Stewardship event. In this interview, he dives deeper into the risks and benefits of human intervention and describes an ambitious plan to build a vast monitoring network of autonomous sensors in the ocean to help humanity understand the impact.

Who is the world’s fastest runner? It depends on timing — and whether we’re deciding based on speed, stamina, or something in between.

Climate pollutants have a similar story (as described by the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, or IGSD). Each pollutant that warms our planet has a different potency and lifetime in the atmosphere — not unlike the pace and endurance of different runners.

Yet for most climate emissions metrics, it’s like putting a sprinter and marathoner in the same race — with an arbitrary distance that could suit some better than others. Efforts to improve these metrics have faced decades of inertia, but science-backed alternatives could accelerate action across the pollutants.

In a big year for climate action, 2022 saw the United States double down on strategies and mechanisms to accelerate its economy toward achieving net zero. These incentives at the state and federal level (including the CHIPS and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act) promise to slash emissions across key sectors, strengthen communities, and provide new development opportunities. This is a critical boost for US heavy industries, particularly the iron and steel sector, which need both regulatory and economic instruments to transition effectively.

The US steel industry claims one of the cleanest global emissions footprints due to its high recycling rate of scrap. Roughly 70 percent of the steel made in the United States comes from this recycled scrap (known as secondary steel) and is produced in electric arc furnaces (EAFs, also known as mini-mills).

The collection, sorting, and market for scrap is well executed, with a recycling rate between 80 and 90 percent. But the supply of scrap is fundamentally limited by the rate at which steel-containing products like cars, buildings, and white goods reach end-of-life. This means that even as scrap-based suppliers expand and attempt to move up the quality ladder into sectors like automotive, achieving a net-zero steel sector will still require investments in new low-emissions ore-based primary steel. In fact, the handful of ore-based steel assets in the Midwest disproportionally accounts for approximately 73 percent of the sector’s emissions due to the higher energy use and reliance on coal.

The ancient Roman Empire still makes its presence felt throughout Europe. Bathhouses, aqueducts, and seawalls built more than 2000 years ago are still standing—thanks to a special type of concrete that has proved far more durable than its modern counterpart. Now, researchers say they have figured out why Roman concrete remains so resilient: Quicklime used in the mix may have given the material self-healing properties.

The work could help engineers improve the performance of modern concrete, says Marie Jackson, a geologist who studies ancient Roman concrete at the University of Utah, but who was not involved with the research.

The Romans were not the first to invent concrete, but they were the first to employ it on a mass scale. By 200 B.C.E., concrete was used in the majority of their construction projects. Roman concrete consisted of a mixture of a white powder known as slaked lime, small particles and rock fragments called tephra ejected by volcanic eruptions, and water.

Researchers may have identified the protein that helps the delicate hair cells of the cochlea, our spiral-shaped inner ear cavity, convert signals from sound waves into electrical signals sent to our brains, The Scientist reports. Proteins called TMC1s create a valve in our inner ear cells, opening up in the presence of sound waves to let charged particles flow, setting off a cascade of signaling to the brain, the researchers report this week in Neuron. The discovery marks a breakthrough in a 40-year quest during which several biological candidates were proposed, only to be disproved shortly thereafter. The team hopes their new findings can be used to develop new treatments for hearing loss.

In the late 1950s, dentist and US Navy Capt. Kirk C. Hoerman, then a young man in his 30s, attempted to answer a bold question: Might the saliva of prostate cancer patients have different characteristics from that of healthy people? Could it contain traces of a disease that’s so far away from the mouth?

Without wasting more of their own saliva on elaborate discussion, Hoerman and his colleagues from the department of dental research at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, got down to work. They analyzed samples from more than 200 patients and healthy controls, and found that the saliva of patients with untreated prostate cancer showed a significant increase in the levels of enzymes called acid phosphatases.

Writing in 1959 in the journal Cancer, the researchers then made a prescient reflection: that it may be valuable to observe discrete biochemical changes in tissues distant from the site of tumor origin.

More than 60 years later, the idea that saliva analysis can be used to detect different types of cancer is gaining traction in the scientific community. In the specialized literature, papers containing the keywords “diagnosis,” “cancer” and “saliva” grew more than tenfold over the past two decades, from 26 in 2001 to 117 in 2011, 183 in 2016 and 319 in 2021, according to the PubMed database, a search engine for biomedical research articles.

Computers have been digital for half a century. Why would anyone want to resurrect the clunkers of yesteryear?

When old tech dies, it usually stays dead. No one expects rotary phones or adding machines to come crawling back from oblivion. Floppy diskettes, VHS tapes, cathode-ray tubes—they shall rest in peace. Likewise, we won’t see old analog computers in data centers anytime soon. They were monstrous beasts: difficult to program, expensive to maintain, and limited in accuracy.

In this short video, Alex Slawsby of InnoLead, Scott Anthony of Dartmouth College, and Fiona Murray of MIT discuss the “three horizons” concept (sometimes referred to as H1, H2, H3), and how it relates to incremental, adjacent, and transformational innovation.

“H1, H2, H3 generally is a temporal element,” referring to short-term, medium-term, and long-term projects, says Scott Anthony, Clinical Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and Managing Director at Innosight. “In general, it can lead to you making some mistakes, because you might have something that just takes a really long time, but is a very adjacent move, and confuse yourself into thinking you need to manage it in a different way… Time will sometimes match, but sometimes won’t.”

The rules of the game are changing. While growth in traditional markets has plateaued, new markets, including those created by technology disruption, are hot. Growth opportunities are expanding in areas related to the energy transition and low-emission technology as well as in gene therapy, the metaverse, and quantum computing. The basic drivers of lasting superior corporate performance are shifting—and companies that wish to thrive need to adapt to a world defined by digital engagement, embedded (and generative) AI, and low-emissions products, processes, and supply chains.

Some companies are already on board. They know how to rack up gains from digital and data investments without falling into the trap of lengthy IT projects with large cost overruns. They’ve found a way to invest not only in smart technology but also in their people, operations, and culture to realize value from their investments. Their financial and nonfinancial performance is dramatically superior to that of companies still playing by the old rules.

The Big Questions for a Sustainable Future is an ongoing series that explores big questions for companies as they prepare to lead their organisations into the sustainable future. This question explores the crucial link between an organisation’s ESG score and the business and sustainability narrative.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to release a draft regulation limiting two fluorinated chemicals, known by the abbreviations PFOA and PFOS, in drinking water. These chemicals are two types of PFAS, a broad class of substances often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they are very persistent in the environment.

PFAS are widely used in hundreds of products, from nonstick cookware coatings to food packaging, stain- and water-resistant clothing and firefighting foams. Studies show that high levels of PFAS exposure may lead to health effects that include reduced immune system function, increased cholesterol levels and elevated risk of kidney or testicular cancer.

Population-based screenings over the past 20 years show that most Americans have been exposed to PFAS and have detectable levels in their blood. The new regulation is designed to protect public health by setting an enforceable maximum standard limiting how much of the two target chemicals can be present in drinking water – one of the main human exposure pathways.

These three articles from The Conversation’s archives explain growing concerns about the health effects of exposure to PFAS and why many experts support national regulation of these chemicals.