The advancement of bimetallic catalysts holds significant promise for the innovation of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. Drawing from adsorbate evolution mechanism (AEM) and lattice oxygen oxidation mechanism (LOM), the incorporation of dual active sites has the potential to foster novel OER pathways, such as the coupled oxygen evolution mechanism (COM), which can surpass the limitations of OER and elevate catalytic performance. In this study, uniformly distributed Fe/Ni dual-site Fe-Ni₂P@C electrocatalysts are crafted by upcycling metals in electroplating sludge via an eco-friendly and sustainable microbial engineering technique. Our findings indicate that a substantial number of defects emerge at the Ni₂P crystal during the OER process, laying the groundwork for lattice oxygen involvement. Moreover, the displacement of Ni/Fe in the crystal lattice intensifies the asymmetry of the electronic structure at the metal active sites, facilitating the deprotonation process. This research introduces an innovative paradigm for the synthesis of effective and robust transition metal-based OER catalysts, with implications for sustainable energy generation technologies.

It has been proved to be an effective route to efficiently ameliorate photocatalytic performance of catalysts via designing three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical nanostructures and constructing oxygen vacancies (V_Os). However, controlling the self-assembly of organization into 3D hierarchical nanostructures while introducing V_Os in photocatalysts remains a challenge. Herein, we reported an ethylene glycol (EG) mediated approach to craft 3D hydrangea-structure Bi₂MoO₆ with V_Os for efficient photocatalytic degradation of tetracycline. Through manipulating the EG concentration during the fabrication process, the influence of EG concentration on the Bi₂MoO₆ structure was systematically investigated. EG could promote the self-assembly of Bi₂MoO₆ nanosheets to form a 3D hierarchical structure. Compared with 2D nanoplates, 3D hierarchical architecture enhanced the surface area and the amount of active sites of Bi₂MoO₆. In addition, the reduction effect of EG on metallic oxide enabled the generation of V_Os in Bi₂MoO₆. The V_Os adjusted the electronic structure of Bi₂MoO₆, which not only enhanced the light harvesting, but also facilitated the simultaneous utilization of photo-induced electrons and holes to form reactive oxygen species (·O²⁻ and ·OH) for the efficient tetracycline decomposition. 3D Bi₂MoO₆ hydrangea with V_Os achieved a 79.4% removal efficiency of tetracycline after 75 min. This work provides a simple yet robust EG-mediated strategy, which not only promotes the self-assembly of nano-catalysts into 3D hierarchical architectures, but also crafts tunable V_Os for highly efficient photocatalysis.

Reservoir computing (RC) is an energy-efficient computational framework with low training cost and high efficiency in processing spatiotemporal information. The state-of-the-art fully memristor-based hardware RC system suffers from bottlenecks in the computation efficiencies and accuracy due to the limited temporal tunability in the volatile memristor for the reservoir layer and the nonlinearity in the nonvolatile memristor for the readout layer. Additionally, integrating different types of memristors brings fabrication and integration complexities. To overcome the challenges, a multifunctional multi-terminal electrolyte-gated transistor (MTEGT) that combines both electrostatic and electrochemical doping mechanisms is proposed in this work, integrating both widely tunable volatile dynamics with high temporal tunable range of 10² and nonvolatile memory properties with high long-term potentiation/long-term depression (LTP/LTD) linearity into a single device. An ion-controlled physical RC system fully implemented with only one type of MTEGT is constructed for image recognition using the volatile dynamics for the reservoir and nonvolatility for the readout layer. Moreover, an ultralow normalized mean square error of 0.002 is achieved in a time series prediction task. It is believed that the MTEGT would underlie next-generation neuromorphic computing systems with low hardware costs and high computational performance.

In the 21^st century, the rapid development of human society has made people's demand for green energy more and more urgent. The high-energy-density hydrogen energy obtained by fully splitting water is not only environmentally friendly, but also is expected to solve the problems caused by the intermittent nature of new energy. However, the slow kinetics and large overpotential of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) limit its application. The introduction of Te element is expected to bring new breakthroughs. With the least electronegativity among the chalcogens, the Te element has many special properties, such as multivalent states, strong covalentity, and high electrical conductivity, which make it a promising candidate in electrocatalytic OER. In this review, we introduce the peculiarities of Te element, summarize Te doping and the extraordinary performance of its compounds in OER, with emphasis on the scientific mechanism behind Te element promoting the OER kinetic process. Finally, challenges and development prospects of the applications of Te element in OER are presented.

H₂O₂ is an environmentally friendly chemical for a wide range of water treatments. The industrial production of H₂O₂ is an anthraquinone oxidation process, which, however, consumes extensive energy and produces pollution. Here we report a green and sustainable piezocatalytic intermediate water splitting process to simultaneously obtain H₂O₂ and H₂ using single crystal vanadium (V)-doped NaNbO₃ (V-NaNbO₃) nanocubes as catalysts. The introduction of V improves the specific surface area and active sites of NaNbO₃. Notably, V-NaNbO₃ piezocatalysts of 10 mg exhibit 3.1-fold higher piezocatalytic efficiency than the same catalysts of 50 mg, as more piezocatalysts lead to higher probability of aggregation. The aggregation causes reducing active sites and decreased built-in electric field due to the neutralization between different nano-catalysts. Remarkably, piezocatalytic H₂O₂ and H₂ production rates of V-NaNbO₃ (10 mol%) nanocubes (102.6 and 346.2 μmol·g⁻¹·h⁻¹, respectively) are increased by 2.2 and 4.6 times compared to the as-prepared pristine NaNbO₃ counterparts, respectively. This improved catalytic efficiency is attributed to the promoted piezo-response and more active sites of NaNbO₃ catalysts after V doping, as uncovered by piezo-response force microscopy (PFM) and density functional theory (DFT) simulation. More importantly, our DFT results illustrate that inducing V could reduce the dynamic barrier of water dissociation over NaNbO₃, thus enhancing the yield of H₂O₂ and H₂. This facile yet robust piezocatalytic route using minimal amounts of catalysts to obtain H₂O₂ and H₂ may stand out as a promising candidate for environmental applications and water splitting.