🧪 Chemistry & Materials

Perovskite solar cells achieve impressive efficiencies in the lab but degrade rapidly under real-world conditions. Xu et al. engineer an ionic liquid with an ethylene glycol ether side chain that addresses both efficiency and thermal stability simultaneously.

Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction could turn a greenhouse gas into fuels and chemicals. Metal-organic frameworks offer remarkable tunability of active sites, but selectivity and scalability remain formidable barriers. Tian et al. map the landscape.

Why purify seawater before splitting it? Direct seawater electrolysis skips the desalination step—but faces chloride corrosion, competing chlorine evolution, and membrane fouling. A new anode catalyst now survives 9,000 hours at 1.0 A/cm². The economics are shifting.

Perovskite catalysts offer extraordinary compositional tunability for hydrogen production, but the gap between lab-scale activity and industrial durability remains wide. A review with 194 citations maps the full stack from electricity source to electrolyte, while new S-scheme heterojunctions push photoelectrochemical efficiency.

NaSICON electrolytes for sodium batteries are gaining momentum as post-lithium candidates. Mn doping boosts ionic conductivity ~4× and Sn doping achieves >2 mS/cm, while grain boundary engineering suppresses dendrite growth. But the electrolyte-electrode interface problem remains the field's critical bottleneck.

Atmospheric CO₂ concentration passed ~426 ppm in 2024. Direct air capture (DAC) technologies aim to pull CO₂ directly from ambient air, but the thermodynamic penalty is steep: extracting a gas present...

Electrochemical CO₂ reduction (CO₂RR) powered by renewable electricity could close the carbon cycle by converting waste CO₂ into fuels and chemical feedstocks. Copper is the only monometallic catalyst...

Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight is the holy grail of renewable energy chemistry. A single semiconductor photocatalyst must satisfy contradictory requirements: a bandgap wide en...

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries promise a theoretical energy density of 2,600 Wh/kg — roughly 3× the theoretical energy density of lithium-ion batteries — using earth-abundant, inexpensive sulfur cath...

Single-junction silicon solar cells dominate the photovoltaic market but are approaching their theoretical efficiency limit (~29.4%, Shockley-Queisser). Stacking a wide-bandgap perovskite (~1.7 eV) on...

The chemical industry produces ~$5.7 trillion worth of products annually, but at enormous environmental cost: hazardous solvents, toxic reagents, energy-intensive processes, and persistent waste strea...

Traditional drug discovery takes 10–15 years and costs an estimated $2–3 billion per approved drug (including the cost of failures), with a >90% failure rate. Computational approaches promise to compr...

Lithium-ion batteries dominate short-duration energy storage (2–4 hours), but grid-scale integration of renewables requires long-duration energy storage (LDES) — 10+ hours to days — to bridge multi-da...

Single-atom catalysts (SACs) represent the ultimate in atom efficiency: every metal atom is catalytically active, sitting as an isolated site on a support material. Since Zhang et al.'s 2011 coining o...

Frances Arnold's Nobel Prize-winning directed evolution mimics natural selection in the laboratory: introduce random mutations, screen for improved function, repeat. But the protein fitness landscape ...

Covalent chemistry builds molecules atom by atom; supramolecular chemistry assembles structures through weaker, reversible interactions — hydrogen bonds, π-π stacking, metal-ligand coordination, hydro...

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) technology underpins both sides of the hydrogen economy: electrolysers split water into hydrogen using renewable electricity, and fuel cells recombine hydrogen with oxyg...

Global plastic production exceeds 400 million tonnes annually, with less than 10% recycled. Biodegradable plastics — polylactic acid (PLA), polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), starch blends — promise materia...

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are crystalline, porous materials constructed entirely from light elements (C, H, N, O, B) linked by strong covalent bonds. Unlike metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), C...

The Haber-Bosch process produces ~180 million tonnes of ammonia annually, consuming ~1-2% of global energy and generating ~1.4% of CO₂ emissions. It operates at 400-500°C and 150-300 atm — conditions ...

Quantum dot LEDs (QLEDs) offer saturated colours, wide colour gamut (>140% sRGB), and high efficiency — qualities that position them as successors to OLEDs for next-generation displays. But the best-p...

By 2030, over 11 million tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries will require recycling annually. These batteries contain critical metals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese) at concentrations many time...

Buildings lose approximately 25–40% of their heating and cooling energy through windows. Smart windows that dynamically modulate solar heat gain could dramatically reduce HVAC energy consumption. Vana...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — synthetic chemicals with extraordinarily strong C-F bonds — contaminate the drinking water of an estimated 158–176 million Americans (per 2025 EPA data) an...

Carbon capture is no longer optional—the IPCC projects we need to remove 5–10 GtCO₂/year by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5°C. Current amine scrubber technology works but is energy-intensive (regeneratio...

Hydrogen is the ultimate clean fuel—burning it produces only water. But 95% of today's hydrogen comes from steam methane reforming, which emits 10 kg CO₂ per kg H₂. **Photocatalytic water splitting** ...

The pharmaceutical industry generates **25–100 kg of waste per kg of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API)**—among the highest waste ratios of any manufacturing sector. Hazardous solvents account for...

Ethylene is the world's most-produced organic chemical (~200 million tons/year), underpinning plastics, textiles, and pharmaceuticals. It's currently made from fossil fuel cracking, emitting ~1.5 tons...

Humans produce **400 million tons of plastic waste annually**, with only 9% recycled. Microplastics contaminate every ecosystem on Earth, from deep ocean trenches to human bloodstreams. **Biodegradabl...

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is the "computational microscope" of chemistry, biology, and materials science—but faces a fundamental trade-off. **Ab initio methods** (DFT, coupled cluster) are ac...

Ammonia production (~180 million tonnes/year for fertilizers) consumes **~1-2% of global energy** and produces **~1.4% of CO₂ emissions** through the Haber-Bosch process, which requires 400–500°C and ...

Designing a synthesis route for a complex drug molecule is one of organic chemistry's greatest intellectual challenges—expert chemists spend weeks evaluating thousands of possible reaction pathways. *...

Green hydrogen—produced by splitting water using solar energy—is critical for decarbonizing industry and transport. Perovskite oxide catalysts offer tunable electronic structures and compositional flexibility, but challenges in efficiency, stability, and scale remain substantial.

Google DeepMind's GNoME discovered 2.2 million stable crystal structures using graph neural networks, expanding the known materials universe tenfold. Combined with LLM-driven 'fuzzy knowledge' injection and automated causal mechanism extraction from 61,000+ papers, AI is rewriting the materials science playbook from discovery through understanding.