♦ Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) developed a new language system that could change how we understand and design nanoporous materials, with significant implications for carbon capture and gas separation technologies.

♦ The system, dubbed STRONG (STring Representation Of Nanopore Geometry), translates complex nanopore structures into simple character sequences, similar to how DNA is represented by genetic code.

♦ This innovation addresses a long-standing challenge in the field of 2D materials research, where the unpredictable formation of nanopores - tiny holes in materials like graphene - hampered scientific understanding.

♦ The STRONG system assigns specific letters to different atomic configurations — for example, ‘F’ represents a fully bonded atom with three bonds, while ‘C’ denotes a corner atom with two bonds.

♦ This solution allows machine learning models to “read” and analyse nanopore structures much like ChatGPT processes text.