In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Chemistry, a strategy of ligand-protected direct hydrogen reduction was adapted to prepare zeolite-confined Pt-Pd bimetallic cluster catalysts. These catalysts efficiently catalyze hydrogen production from ammonia borane (AB) solvolysis and tandem hydrogenation of nitroarenes. Interestingly, in the tandem reaction, AB undergoes hydrolysis at the Pt sites to produce active hydrogen species, which are then transferred to the neighboring Pd sites to reduce nitroarenes.

University of Liverpool researchers are part of an international research collaboration that has shed light on what happens at the extremes of neutron and proton numbers, in search of where the periodic table of chemical elements ends. In a study published in the journal Nature, the research team provide insight into the structure of atomic nuclei of fermium (element 100) and nobelium (element 102) with different numbers of neutrons

Have you ever wondered how long it took our Sun to form in its stellar nursery? An international collaboration of scientists is now closer to an answer. They succeeded in the measurement of the bound-state beta decay of fully-ionised thallium (²⁰⁵Tl⁸¹⁺) ions at the Experimental Storage Ring (ESR) of GSI/FAIR. This measurement has profound effects on the production of radioactive lead (²⁰⁵Pb) in asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and can be used to help determine the Sun’s formation time. The results have been published in the journal Nature.

SUTD researchers developed a novel bilayer metasurface that enables unidirectional circularly polarised waves to be emitted, opening up possibilities in the fields of biological and chemical sensing, optical communications, and quantum computing.