Anionic Passivation Enables Reconstruction-Free Seawater Electrolysis.

July 27, 2026| Source: Journal of the American Chemical Society

Nonoxide electrocatalysts hold great promise for high-efficiency seawater oxidation, yet their practical application is hindered by the inevitable surface reconstruction and pronounced corrosion under high anodic potentials. Herein, we solve this longstanding challenge by developing a rational anionic ligand passivation strategy that stabilizes phosphide lattices against oxidative degradation while preserving inherent electrocatalytic activity. Leveraging Lewis acid-base interactions, we grow an ultrathin, undercoordinated TiO x overlayer on a FeNiP (FNP) support. This overlayer withdraws electrons from lattice phosphorus, downshifts the P p-band center, and thermodynamically stabilizes the entire anionic sublattice against oxidative leaching. The oxidation-resistant scaffold further enables the anchoring of atomically ordered Ir arrays with a well-defined interatomic spacing of ∼2.8 Å, promoting direct O-O radical coupling via the oxide pathway mechanism and effectively circumventing the corrosive lattice oxygen route. Operando spectroscopy and 18 O isotope tracing confirm fully reconstruction-free OER behavior with negligible lattice oxygen participation. The as-developed TiIr@FNP catalyst achieves ultralow overpotentials (only 310 mV at 1 A cm -2 ), operates stably for over 1200 h in alkaline seawater, and maintains near-unity Faradaic efficiency. The work demonstrates a generalizable strategy for designing durable, high-performance nonoxide anodic electrocatalysts under industrially relevant conditions.

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Ancient DNA challenges to admixture narratives: Insights from Notre-Dame Cemetery (1683-1796) in Colonial Montreal, Canada.

Historical narratives of early colonization in Quebec frequently portray French-Indigenous relations as cooperative and characterized by admixture; which are often mobilized in modern debates on false-indigeneity. These narratives have been studied through genealogical, genetic, and bioarchaeological analyses, yet individuals of African descent remain mostly absent from them, while Indigenous peoples are framed largely in relation to colonists. Notre-Dame Cemetery (1683-1796) in Tiohtià:ke-

EconomicsOctober 20, 2026

Understanding consciousness (biological and artificial) as a society of self-schemas.

This article argues that human cognition is more than the performance of functions such as memory, decision-making, and attention. The brain also builds schematic models of those cognitive functions and uses those models to monitor, predict, and partially control them. When you introspect, your understanding of who you are and what is happening inside of you is derived from those schematic, sometimes inaccurate, but generally useful models, rather than from the actual cognitive functions that ar

EconomicsOctober 14, 2026

Educational intervention can rewire village social networks.

Social networks shape behaviour, affect information dissemination and undergird collective action. And they can be exploited in the design of interventions in these domains 1-7 . Although social networks obey fundamental principles, such as the degree distribution 8,9 , they can nevertheless evolve as ties form and break. Here, through a randomized controlled trial involving a total of 8,331 people in 110 remote Honduran villages, we evaluate the secondary effects of a 22-month public-health int

EconomicsOctober 13, 2026

Hyperfunction of PSD-95 leads to hyperexcitability and cognitive abnormalities in MEF2C haploinsufficiency.

Myocyte enhancer factor 2C (MEF2C) is a transcription factor critical for brain circuit development and cognitive behavior. The loss of one copy of MEF2C leads to MEF2C haploinsufficiency syndrome (MCHS), a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by intellectual disability, epilepsy, and behavioral phenotypes associated with autism spectrum disorders. Given that numerous genes are regulated by MEF2C, the neuronal and behavioral deficits in MCHS are complex, and there is currently no effective

EconomicsOctober 13, 2026

Interventions to mitigate post-infection morbidity: Management insights from simple models.

A variety of pathogens that cause acute disease can also affect their host long after recovery. These post-infection effects lead to elevated costs for individuals and societies, which can be mitigated by large-scale interventions. Here, we examine the management of post-infection morbidity with mathematical models. First, we show that long-term usage of nonpharmaceutical interventions can reduce post-acute burden. Second, to investigate how post-infection effects affect optimal vaccination cove