MIT researchers use computer models to accelerate search for greener ammonia catalysts

For more than a century, humanity has fed itself through a chemical process that quietly devours energy and exhales carbon — the Haber-Bosch method of making ammonia, which underpins the fertilizers sustaining eight billion lives. Now, a team at MIT has turned to quantum mechanics and machine learning not to replace that process overnight, but to find the missing catalyst that might one day make a cleaner alternative economically viable. It is the kind of patient, foundational science that rarely makes headlines yet quietly shapes the conditions of the future.