Transition-metal alloys have attracted a great deal of attention as an alternative to Pt-based catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in alkaline. Herein, a facile and convenient strategy to fabricate Co3Mo binary alloy nanoparticles nesting onto molybdenum oxide nanosheet arrays on nickel foam is developed. By modulating the annealing time and temperature, the Co3Mo alloy catalyst displays a superior HER performance. Owing to substantial active sites of nanoparticles on nanosheets as well as the intrinsic HER activity of Co3Mo alloy and no use of binders, the obtained catalyst requires an extremely low overpotential of only 68 mV at 10 mA cm–2 in alkaline, with a corresponding Tafel slope of 61 mV dec–1. At the same time, the catalyst demonstrates excellent stability during the long-term measurements. The density functional theory calculation provides a deeper insight into the HER mechanism, unveiling that the active sites on the Co3Mo-based catalyst are Mo atoms. This strategy of combining catalytic active species with hierarchical nanoscale materials can be extended to other applications and provides a candidate of nonnoble metal catalysts for practical electrochemical water splitting.

Constructing regularly catalytic arrays is essential for electrochemical catalysis, especially for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). In this work, two-dimensional zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) arrays were chosen as templates to construct few-layer MoS 2 -decorated hollow CoP. By coupling MoS 2 nanosheets arrays and two-dimensional ZIF-67 derived CoP, the advantages of the active sites of MoS 2 nanosheets edges and CoP are combined for efficient HER, which can drive a current density of 100 mA/cm 2 in both acid (91 mV) and alkaline (135 mV) solutions for 10 h. Furthermore, the prepared catalyst can reach a current density of 10 mA/cm 2 with overpotentials of only 53 and 77 mV in 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 and 1 M KOH, respectively. Most importantly, we believe replacing ZIF-67 powders with 2D ZIF-67 arrays can boost the electrochemical activities for HER and this method can provide us a guideline for the future application of two-dimensional ZIF-67 arrays to construct efficient electrocatalysts.

The nanoalloy structure greatly improves the catalytic activity for electrocatalytic N2 reduction and Suzuki–Miyaura coupling reactions under ambient conditions.

In nature, polycyclic phloroglucinols are a class of compounds with considerable structural diversity and promising biological activities. Herein, we present an improved one-pot method that replaces the solution reaction conditions by mixing the reactants with column chromatography silica gel. Through this convenient, mild, slow, and diversity-oriented strategy, eight structurally unique polycyclic phloroglucinols were discovered, of which compound 1 possesses a rare cage-like skeleton. All compounds determined their structures by X-ray diffraction. Compared with traditional methods, this synthetic strategy produced better diversity and unique structures under milder conditions, suggesting that this method has great potential in lead compound discovery. The optimal reaction conditions were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) monitoring over time. In addition, density functional theory (DFT) calculations were performed to investigate the possible generative pathway of compound 1. We also examined the neuroprotective actions of selected compounds on SH-SY5Y cells and the MPP+-induced Caenorhabditis elegans PD model.