MIT Researchers Announce Cement Breakthrough

A team at MIT says they've made a breakthrough in studying cement that could reduce worldwide greenhouse gas pollution.

Researchers have for the first time decoded the atomic building blocks of cement, an ingredient in concrete, and the most used material on earth after water.

Professor Franz Ulm said now that scientists understand cement's structure, they can focus on changing it to make both cement and concrete "greener."

"The ultimate goal of this whole project is to come up with greener concrete solutions," Ulm said. "So, otherwise said, that concrete can actually become part of the solution and not just a problem."

The research appears in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.