Single-cluster anchored on PC monolayer as high-performance electrocatalyst for carbon dioxide reduction reaction: First principles study.

Tremendous challenges remain to develop high-efficient catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CORR) owing to the poor activity and low selectivity. However, the activity of catalyst with single active site is limited by the linear scaling relationship between the adsorption energy of intermediates. Motivated by the idea of multiple activity centers, triple metal clusters (M = Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Pd, and Rh) doped PC monolayer (M@PC) were constructed in this study to investigate the CORR catalytic performance via density functional theory calculations.

Semiquantitative naked-eye detection of synthetic food colorants using highly-branched pipette tip as an all-in-one device.

The existing strategies for the determination of synthetic food colorants (FCs) in manufactured foods are highly relied on specialized instruments and skilled personnel which are limited by the high technical threshold and instrumentation cost. Herein, highly branched pipette tips (PTs) were fabricated as a robust all-in-one device for high-performance extraction and visual detection of FCs via handy aspiration and dispensing procedures of pipette controller. The density of extraction groups and inner specific surface area of PTs greatly increased after facile physical coating and subsequent layer-by-layer branching reactions, and the maximum increment in binding capacity of PTs was exceeded 300 times at 8-10 iterations of branching layers, enabling the PTs to be colored just by short-time extraction of FCs and to achieve the instrument-independent visual detection of FCs by virtue of their outstanding PT-SPE performance.