The potential of employing the lysozyme-Au NCs for bacterial labeling and as antimicrobial agents is expected.

climate change. [2] Many countries established legislations to limit the CO 2 emissions, targeting at carbon neutrality. [3] Meanwhile, efficient and clean battery systems are being developed. The lithium-ion battery (LIB) is the most successful and widely used system. [4] However, the relatively low energy density severely hindered the applications of LIBs. Recently, metalair batteries have attracted much attention due to their ultrahigh energy density. [5] However, most of them need to work in a pure oxygen environment. [6] Therefore, an energy-storage system directly utilizing CO 2 gas as redox medium is highly favorable.In 2013, Archer and co-workers proposed the concept of Li-CO 2 battery for CO 2 capture and energy storage, in which Li metal and CO 2 gas are the active materials in the anode and cathode side, respectively. [7] During discharge, Li + reacts with CO 2 to generate Li 2 CO 3 and carbon as discharge products, which is a CO 2 reduction reaction (CO 2 RR) process described as 4Li + + 3CO 2 + 4e − → 2Li 2 CO 3 + C. [8] In the reverse charging process, a CO 2 evolution reaction (CO 2 ER) occurs by decomposing Li 2 CO 3 into Li + and CO 2 gas. Many merits are identified for the Li-CO 2 battery system like the direct employing greenhouse gas of CO 2 and the high theoretical energy density of 1876 Wh kg −1 . [9] However, issues including but not limited to the large overpotential, poor cycling performance, and inferior rate capability significantly hinder the application of Li-CO 2 batteries. One dominating reason for these issues is the intrinsically sluggish kinetics of the CO 2 RR and CO 2 ER processes.Therefore, the key task for the practical application of Li-CO 2 batteries is to develop highly efficient catalysts toward the CO 2 RR and CO 2 ER. Large varieties of catalysts, such as carbon-based catalysts, [6,8a,b,10] single-metal-atom catalysts, [11] adjacent metal atoms catalyst, [12] nanostructured metal/alloy catalysts, [13] and transition metal compound catalysts [14] were developed for Li-CO 2 batteries to facilitate the CO 2 reduction and promote the decomposition of Li 2 CO 3 . Metallic ruthenium (Ru) and Ru-based materials is an important catalyst family for the CO 2 RR and CO 2 ER. [15] Ru catalyst has intrinsic advantage in The Li-CO 2 battery is a novel strategy for CO 2 capture and energy-storage applications. However, the sluggish CO 2 reduction and evolution reactions cause large overpotential and poor cycling performance. Herein, a new catalyst containing well-defined ruthenium (Ru) atomic clusters (Ru AC ) and single-atom Ru-N 4 (Ru SA ) composite sites on carbon nanobox substrate (Ru AC+SA @NCB) (NCB = nitrogen-doped carbon nanobox) is fabricated by utilizing the different complexation effects between the Ru cation and the amine group (NH 2 ) on carbon quantum dots or nitrogen moieties on NCB. Systematic experimental and theoretical investigations demonstrate the vital role of electronic synergy between Ru AC and Ru-N 4 in improving the electrocatalytic activity toward the C...

Aqueous zinc-based batteries (AZBs) attract tremendous attention due to the abundant and rechargeable zinc anode. Nonetheless, the requirement of high energy and power densities raises great challenge for the cathode development. Herein we construct an aqueous zinc ion capacitor possessing an unrivaled combination of high energy and power characteristics by employing a unique dual-ion adsorption mechanism in the cathode side. Through a templating/activating co-assisted carbonization procedure, a routine protein-rich biomass transforms into defect-rich carbon with immense surface area of 3657.5 m2 g−1 and electrochemically active heteroatom content of 8.0 at%. Comprehensive characterization and DFT calculations reveal that the obtained carbon cathode exhibits capacitive charge adsorptions toward both the cations and anions, which regularly occur at the specific sites of heteroatom moieties and lattice defects upon different depths of discharge/charge. The dual-ion adsorption mechanism endows the assembled cells with maximum capacity of 257 mAh g−1 and retention of 72 mAh g−1 at ultrahigh current density of 100 A g−1 (400 C), corresponding to the outstanding energy and power of 168 Wh kg−1 and 61,700 W kg−1. Furthermore, practical battery configurations of solid-state pouch and cable-type cells display excellent reliability in electrochemistry as flexible and knittable power sources.

Glutathione-bound gold nanoclusters (AuNCs@GSH) can emit reddish photoluminescence under illumination of ultraviolet light. The luminescence of the AuNCs@GSH is quenched when chelating with iron ions (AuNCs@GSH-Fe(3+)), presumably resulting from the effective electron transfer between the nanoclusters and iron ions. Nevertheless, we found that the luminescence of the gold nanoclusters can be restored in the presence of phosphate-containing molecules, which suggested the possibility of using AuNCs@GSH-Fe(3+) complexes as the selective luminescent switches for phosphate-containing metabolites. Phosphate-containing metabolites such as adenosine-5'-triphosphate (ATP) and pyrophosphate play an important role in biological systems. In this study, we demonstrated that the luminescence of the AuNCs@GSH-Fe(3+) is switched-on when mixing with ATP and pyrophosphate, which can readily be observed by the naked eye. It results from the high formation constants between phosphates and iron ions. When employing fluorescence spectroscopy as the detection tool, quantitative analysis for phosphate-containing metabolites such as ATP and pyrophosphate can be conducted. The linear range for ATP and pyrophosphate is 50 μM to sub-millimolar, while the limit of detection for ATP and pyrophosphate are ∼43 and ∼28 μM, respectively. Additionally, we demonstrated that the luminescence of the AuNCs@GSH-Fe(3+) can also be turned on in the presence of phosphate-containing metabolites from cell lysates and blood plasma.

Many estuaries have regions with locally elevated suspended sediment concentration (SSC), which are referred to as an Estuarine Turbidity Maximum (ETM) (Dyer, 1986;Schubel, 1968). ETMs are areas with a convergence of sediment transport, often corresponding to the landward limit of salt intrusion. With high SSCs, the ETMs lead to dynamic bed behavior and may influence tidal propagation through damping of turbulence (Burchard & Baumert, 1998;Geyer, 1993;Talke & Jay, 2020). Understanding the dynamics of ETMs is important for the management of navigation channels, freshwater resources and ecosystem services.ETMs reflect trapping of sediment in the longitudinal direction, often as a result of (at least one of) two main mechanisms: Tidal asymmetry and estuarine circulation. Tidal asymmetry is the distortion of the tidal wave resulting from non-linear interactions between the tide and channel morphology (