Omar Yaghi remembers growing up in the dry city of Amman, Jordan, where he was responsible for collecting his family’s fresh drinking water. “Sometimes, there wasn’t enough,” he said. “So I learned that water is precious.” Those experiences laid the foundation for his work developing metal-organic frameworks that have revolutionized chemistry, allowed for water to be pulled from dry desert air, and earned him this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The frameworks his research helped develop are porous, sponge-like materials that pack a punch in even the tiniest amount. A one-gram, sugar cube-sized MOF can boast an internal surface area of up to 10,000 square meters — the size of two football fields.  They’re highly customizable, too. Capable of harvesting water from the desert air, they can also capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The technology is already capturing CO2 from emissions-heavy cement plants before it enters the atmosphere. Dozens of companies are researching MOF...