Cement's basic molecular structure final...( In the 2000 or so years since the Ro...)

In the 2,000 or so years since the Roman Empire employed a naturally occurring form of cement to build a vast system of concrete aqueducts and other large edifices, researchers have analyzed the molecular structure of natural materials and created entirely new building materials such as steel, which has a well-documented crystalline structure at the atomic scale.

Oddly enough, the three-dimensional crystalline structure of cement hydrate - the paste that forms and quickly hardens when cement powder is mixed with water - has eluded scientific attempts at decoding, despite the fact that concrete is the most prevalent man-made material on earth and the focus of a multibillion-dollar industry that is under pressure to clean up its act. The manufacture of cement is responsible for about 5 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, and new emission standards proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could push the cement industry to the developing world.

"Cement is so widely used as a building material that nobody is going to replace it anytime soon. But it has a carbon dioxide problem, so a basic understanding of this material could be very timely," said MIT Professor Sidney Yip, co-author of a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) during the week of Sept. 7 that announces the decoding of the three-dimensional structure of the basic unit of cement hydrate by a group of MIT researchers who have adopted the team name of Liquid Stone.

"We believe this work is a first step toward a consistent model of the molecular structure of cement hydrate, and we hope the scientific community will work with it," said Yip, who is in MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). "In every field there are breakthroughs that help the research frontier moving forward. One example is Watson and Crick's discovery of the basic structure of DNA. That structural model put b
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