Increasing concerns regarding the sustainability of lithium sources, due to their limited availability and consequent expected price increase, have raised awareness of the importance of developing alternative energy-storage candidates that can sustain the ever-growing energy demand. Furthermore, limitations on the availability of the transition metals used in the manufacturing of cathode materials, together with questionable mining practices, are driving development towards more sustainable elements. Given the uniformly high abundance and cost-effectiveness of sodium, as well as its very suitable redox potential (close to that of lithium), sodium-ion battery technology offers tremendous potential to be a counterpart to lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in different application scenarios, such as stationary energy storage and low-cost vehicles. This potential is reflected by the major investments that are being made by industry in a wide variety of markets and in diverse material combinations. Despite the associated advantages of being a drop-in replacement for LIBs, there are remarkable differences in the physicochemical properties between sodium and lithium that give rise to different behaviours, for example, different coordination preferences in compounds, desolvation energies, or solubility of the solid–electrolyte interphase inorganic salt components. This demands a more detailed study of the underlying physical and chemical processes occurring in sodium-ion batteries and allows great scope for groundbreaking advances in the field, from lab-scale to scale-up. This roadmap provides an extensive review by experts in academia and industry of the current state of the art in 2021 and the different research directions and strategies currently underway to improve the performance of sodium-ion batteries. The aim is to provide an opinion with respect to the current challenges and opportunities, from the fundamental properties to the practical applications of this technology.

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An ovel metal-free synthesis of 3,3-disubstituted benzofuran-2-(3H)-ones through reacting a-aryl-a-diazoacetates with triarylboranes is presented. Initially,t riarylboranes were successfully investigated in a-arylations of a-diazoacetates,h owever in the presence of ah eteroatom in the ortho position, the boron enolate intermediate undergoes an intramolecular rearrangement to form aq uaternary center.T he intermediate cyclizes to affordv aluable 3,3-disubstituted benzofuranones in good yields.

The first example of a homogenous As catalyst for hydroboration has been established. The reaction of N,N'-diisopropylbenzene diamine or toluene-3,4-dithiol with AsCl yielded the chloroarsoles (1 and 2), which upon reaction with benzyl alcohol yielded the benzyloxy benzo-1,3,2-diazaarsole (3) and benzo-1,3,2-dithiaarsole (4), respectively. Compound 3 was found to be an excellent catalyst for the hydroboration of aldehyde substrates.

The reaction of phosphole/arsole starting materials with a series of halide abstraction reagents afforded their respective phosphenium/arsenium complexes. UV-vis absorption and luminescence studies on these cations showed interesting emission profiles, which was found to be dependent upon counterion choice. The addition of a reductant to the phosphole reagent garnered a dimeric species with a central P-P bond, which when heated was found to undergo homolytic bond cleavage to produce an 11π radical complex. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), supported by density functional theory (DFT) calculations, was used to characterize this radical species.