In a recent issue of Cell Reports Physical Science, Bent and co-workers studied the electrochemical conversion of four typical nickel-based precatalysts toward alkaline oxygen evolution reaction and the effect of iron impurities on their conversion and catalytic activity. This is undoubtedly a key guide for designing alkaline oxygen evolution precatalysts.

In a recent issue of Nature Chemistry, Zhang and coworkers showed that the ATP-dependent N-nitrosylase Tri17 can catalyze azide synthesis. Tri17 is a promiscuous enzyme that can catalyze N-nitrosylation of various substrates. When specific substrates were used, it also catalyzed the dehydration of the N-nitroso moiety to synthesize an azide moiety.

In a recent issue of Nature Catalysis, Rost et al. directly visualized the step bunching on flame-annealed Pt(111)-vicinal surfaces at high step densities using in situ electrochemical scanning tunneling microscopy (EC-STM). This phenomenon originates from the increased step-step repulsive interaction between closely distanced steps, and the surface-free energy will be lowered when forming bunched

Understanding the evolution of Cu-based catalysts during electrochemical CO2 reduction (ECR) remains challenging. The study by Lim et al. in Joule devises an operando scanning transmission X-ray microscopy to investigate the dynamic phase transformations of Cu catalysts and reveals that Cu2+ species play a crucial role in enhancing C–C coupling. The findings inform the authors of an approach to dynamically