Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

Researchers have discovered strange minerals inside a Siberian mine that are unlike anything previously found in nature.

What's fascinating is that, since the 1980s, scientists have been growing very similar materials in the lab, but until now, they never thought they could actually exist in nature.

These lab-grown materials are known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, and they work sort of like molecular sponges, which can soak up gases such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

As you can imagine, in a world where CO2 emissions are threatening the futurehabitability of the planet, that's an incredibly handy trait to have. So for decades, researchers have been tweaking these MOFs, slowly improving on them, without ever suspecting that they might exist in nature.

The discovery that the same structures could be found in Siberia "completely changes the normal view of these highly popular materials as solely artificial, 'designer' solids," said lead researcher Tomislav Friščić from McGill University in Canada.

"This raises the possibility that there might be other, more abundant, MOF minerals out there."

Oddly enough, the strange Siberian minerals in question - stepanovite and zhemchuzhnikovite - were actually discovered for the first time more than 70 years ago, between the 1940s and 1960s.

But due to the limitations of technology at the time, their structure had never been properly examined.

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