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One example is nitrogen trifluoride, a greenhouse gas that is 16,100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat.

Omar Farha at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, co-founded the spin-out company NuMat Technologies in Skokie, Illinois, in 2012 to develop MOFs that can safely store some of the toxic gases used in the semiconductor industry, including boron trifluoride, phosphine and arsine.

Thanks to a note from reader Robert L., I can report that there is indeed such a reagent: chlorine trifluoride.

The manufacturing process for these devices results in the release of a gas called nitrogen trifluoride, or NF3, which does approximately 17,000 times more environmental damage than carbon dioxide.

He had to devise a special stopcock-sealing grease that boron trifluoride would not attack, a system of magnetically controlled rods for stirring his mixtures in closed vessels.