Modulating lattice oxygen in metal oxides that conducts partial oxidation of methane in balancing C-H activation and syngas selectivity remains challenging. This paper describes the discovery of distorting FeO6 octahedra in La1-xCexFeO3 (x=0, 0.25 0.5, 0.75, 1) orthorhombic perovskites for the promotion of lattice oxygen activation. By combined electrical conductivity relaxation (ECR) measureme...

​The grain boundary in copper-based electrocatalysts has been demonstrated to improve the selectivity of solar-driven electrochemical CO2 reduction towards multi-carbon products. However, the approach to form grain boundaries in copper is still limited. This paper describes a controllable grain growth of copper electrodeposition via poly (vinylpyrrolidone) used as an additive. A grain-boundary...

Foreign element doping could improve the charge transport of photoelectrodes, however, new recombination centers may be introduced. This paper describes a facile photoetching approach that alleviates the negative effects from bulk defects by confining the oxygen vacancy (O vac) at the surface of BiVO4 photoanode, via a 10‐minute photoetching. This strategy could induce enriched O vac at the su...

The active sites of heterogeneous catalysts can be difficult to identify and understand, and, hence, the introduction of active sites into catalysts to tailor their function is challenging. During the past two decades, scaling relationships have been established for important, heterogeneous catalytic reactions. More specifically, a physical or chemical property of the reaction system, termed as...

Silicon-based (Si-based) junctions have been widely investigated in recent years as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting photoelectrodes, including buried junctions and metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) Schottky junctions. However, Si-based MIS photoelectrodes suffer from low performance for PEC oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) because of the dilemma...

Oxygen chemistry plays a pivotal role in numerous chemical, energy and environmental systems. Particularly, selective cleavage of C–H bonds by metal oxo species is highly desirable in the catalytic dehydrogenation of light alkanes. However, high selectivity of alkene is usually hampered through consecutive oxygenation reactions in conventional oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) scheme. Herein, we...

The peroxone reaction between O3 and H2O2 has been deemed a promising technology to resolve the increasingly serious water pollution problem by virtue of the generation of superactive hydroxyl radicals (•OH), but it suffers greatly from an extremely limited reaction rate constant under acidic conditions (ca. less than 0.1 M–1 s–1 at pH 3). This article describes a heterogeneous catalyst comp...

Identification of the active structure under reaction condition is of great importance for rational design of heterogeneous catalysts, but which is often hampered due to their structural complexity. This paper describes the interplay between the surface structure of Co3O4 and the CO2 hydrogenation reaction. Experimental results combined with theoretical calculations show that the Co3O4 with mor...

A correct description of active sites is the precondition towards reaction mechanism study and catalyst screening. In many cases, high-symmetry and ideally ordered crystalline surfaces are used to represent the reactive sites. However, reaction-induced surface segregation and restructuring weaken the rationality of simply employing the suggested most stable surfaces. This paper describes an est...

The search for efficient nontoxic catalysts able to perform industrial hydrogenations is a topic of interest, transversal to many catalytic processes. This communication describes a mechanistic phenomenon of activation and spillover of hydrogen for remarkable selectivity of semi‐hydrogenation of acetylene over sub‐1 nm Pd nanoclusters confined within sodalite (SOD) zeolite (Pd@SOD). Specifica...

​Electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2ER) to reusable carbon resources is a significant step to balance the carbon cycle. This Communication describes a seed-mediated growth method to synthesize ultrathin Pd–Au alloy nanoshells with controllable alloying degree on Pd nanocubes. Specifically, Pd@Pd3Au7 nanocrystals (NCs) show superior CO2ER performance, with a 94% CO faraday effici...

​Catalytic reforming provides a practical technique for on-board hydrogen production in fuel cell applications. The high energy density, easy transportation and non-toxicity of biomass-derived dimethyl ether (bio-DME) offer potential to replace methanol for on-board steam reforming (SR). Presently, the reaction mechanism over conventional Cu-based SR catalysts remains elusive, limiting the rat...

The role of surface hydroxyls is significant for understanding catalytic performance of metallic oxides for CO2 electroreduction reaction (CO2ER). This Communication describes, employing SnOx as a model system, how to moderate coverage of hydroxyl to derive a stable Sn branches catalyst for CO2ER with a 93.1% Faradaic efficiency (FE) of carbonaceous products. With use of in situ attenuated tota...

On the theme of inorganic materials, Editors of Chemical Science highlighted 10 outstanding contributions published on this topic. Wanyu’s work on “Achieving Convenient Tandem of CO2Electroreduction and Photovoltage Using Potential-Independent Disordered Ag Nanoparticles.” has been selected for this collection. Congrats!

CH3OH production from photocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction (PCRR) represents a promising route for the clean utilization of renewable resources, but serious charge recombination, unsatisfied stability and poor selectivity limit its practical application. This paper describes the design and fabrication of 0D/2D materials with polymeric C3N4 nanosheets and CdSe quantum dots (QDs) to enhance the ...

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) CO2 reduction reaction (CRR) in aqueous medium is among the most promising methods to produce renewable fuel with solar and water as the energy and electron source. But the high negative bias remains a prerequisite to achieve an appreciable conversion at present due to the large overpotential of CO2 reduction. This communication describes PEC CRR with low onset potent...

Artificial photosynthesis can store solar energy and reduce CO2 into fuels to potentially alleviate global warming and energy crisis. Compared to gas products, it remains a grand challenge to tune the product distribution of artificial photosynthesis to liquid fuels, such as CH3OH, that are suitable for storage and transport. This paper describes the introduction of metallic Cu nanoparticles (N...

Due to the existence of scaling properties of adsorption energies on transition metal surfaces, the enhancement of the catalytic activity is frequently accompanied by side reactions leading to a reduction in selectivity for the target product. Herein, by systematically screening Pt alloy materials using density functional theory calculations, we developed an approach to breaking the scaling rel...

Electro-reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) is a promising way to curb the excessive CO2 emission and produce value-added products. Gold-copper (AuCu) alloys are known to exhibit eminent CO production performance towards CO2ER. However, it still remains a grand challenge to balance *COOH and *CO bonding and to further descend CO onset potential. This paper describes the construction of Cu vacanci...

Water splits into hydrogen and oxygen electrochemically is one of the most promising strategies for the utilization and storage of solar energy. However, oxygen evolution reaction (OER) with sluggish kinetics hinders its larger-scale application. NiFe-based catalysts are one of the most efficient oxygen evolution catalysts (OECs). High-valence Ni is considered as active site or conductive frame...