A joint research team led by Dr. Hee-Eun Song of the Photovoltaics Research Department at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (President Yi Chang-Keun, hereafter “KIER”) and Prof. Ka-Hyun Kim of the Department of Physics at Chungbuk National University (President Koh Chang-Seup, hereafter “CBNU”) has successfully identified, for the first time, the specific types of defects responsible for efficiency loss in silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells. The findings are expected to significantly contribute to improving solar cell efficiency when combined with defect-suppression (passivation) techniques.

An international research team from the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (SLAB), the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory have developed a novel lead-doped ruthenium-iridium oxide (RuIrPbOₓ) catalyst that exhibits outstanding stability and efficiency for oxygen evolution reactions (OER) in proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers (PEMWEs) operating at high current densities of 3 A/cm². This work addresses longstanding challenges in catalyst durability and performance under acidic, harsh conditions, paving the way for more reliable and cost-effective hydrogen production technologies.

Professor Xiao Shen's research group at Wuhan University developed a new type of palladium-catalyzed tandem cyclization reaction between trifluoroacetylsilane and 1,3-enyne. This strategy effectively suppressed competitive cyclopropanation and cyclopropenylation pathways, selectively promoting the formation of trifluoromethyl-substituted oxatrienes. Subsequently, oxa-6π-electrocyclization efficiently converted them into a series of 6-CF3-2H-pyran derivatives. The authors elucidated the tandem reaction mechanism through DFT calculations: the carbon-carbon triple bond in the 1,3-enyne substrate preferentially inserts into the Pd-Si bond of the acyl divalent palladium intermediate, followed by reductive elimination to generate trifluoromethyl-substituted oxatriene compounds, and finally undergoes oxa-6π-electrocyclization to release the 6-CF3-2H-pyran product. The article was published as an open access research article in CCS Chemistry, the flagship journal of the Chinese Chemical Society.

A massive, multi-year scientific expedition determined that land use on tropical islands can shape water quality in lagoons and that rainfall can be an important mediator for connections between land and lagoon waters. The scale of this research is sigificant: the researchers assessed at algal tissue nutrients, water chemistry, and microbial communities at nearly 200 sites around the island of Mo‘orea, French Polynesia, and repeated this sampling over multiple years.

Producing hydrogen to fuel heavy transport and industry is energy intensive and expensive, using primarily fossil fuels. The greenist solution uses electrolyzers — powered by cheap electricity from wind and solar — to split water into hydrogen. Electrode degradation is a problem, however. A UC Berkeley chemist has redesigned the electrode to improve its lifetime a hundred-fold and reduce hydrogen costs as much as 10 times. This brings closer the era of cost-competitive hydrogen fuel.

Antibiotics that enter rivers and coastal wetlands through wastewater, agriculture, and urban runoff may have far reaching impacts on the chemistry of these ecosystems, according to a new study that identifies the bacteria responsible for breaking down the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole and links this process to increased emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.