Ultrasensitive Monitoring of Cyanide Concentrations in Water Using a Au-Ag Hybrid-Coating-Based Fiber Optical Sensor.

Cyanides, which are extremely toxic chemicals that are rapidly absorbed into the human body and interact with cytochrome oxidase, strongly inhibit cellular respiration to body death with convulsions. Cyanide ions that exist in many forms in nature such as those found in apricot kernels, cassava roots, and bamboo shoots as cyanogenic glycosides are inevitably used in various industries, including gold and silver mining as well as in dyes and plastic industries. In this study, for the sake of developing ultrahigh-sensitive sensors for cyanide monitoring in a simple manner, we chemically synthesize Au-Ag hybrid nanomaterials of different core/shell thicknesses for colorimetric sensors and fiber optical sensors.

Insight into the direct conversion of methane to methanol on modified ZIF-204 from the perspective of DFT-based calculations.

Direct oxidation of methane over oxo-doped ZIF-204, a bio-mimetic metal-organic framework, is investigated under first-principles calculations based on density functional theory. In the pristine ZIF-204, the tetrahedral methane molecule anchors to an open monocopper site the so-called η configuration with a physisorption energy of 0.24 eV.