Electroreduction, or electrodeoxidation, of pelleted SiO2 powder (left image) or its mixture with other metal oxide powders in molten CaCl2 produces pure Si powder (right image), or the respective silicon alloy powder. Being advantageous by simplicity and resulting in less CO2 emission, the electrochemical approach has an energy consumption that is below 13 kWh (kg of Si)−1.

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Anti-lysozyme aptamers are found to preferentially bind to the edge of a tightly packed lysozyme pattern. Such edge-binding is due to the better accessibility and flexibility of the edge lysozyme molecules. Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) was used to study the aptamer-lysozyme binding. Our results show that KPFM is capable of detecting the aptamer-protein binding down to the 30 nm scale. The surface potential of the aptamer-lysozyme complex is approximately 12 mV lower than that of the lysozyme. The surface potential images of the aptamer-bound lysozyme patterns have the characteristic shoulder steps around the pattern edge, which is much wider than that of a clean lysozyme pattern. These results demonstrate the potentials of KPFM as a label-free method for the detection of protein-DNA interactions.

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