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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Global greenhouse gas cobenefits of US irrigated agriculture.

Land use and land conversion for agriculture contribute nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making the sector a key priority for emissions reductions. Crop yields are one factor that modulate agricultural land demand, with, all else equal, global land use change increasing with yield declines and decreasing with yield gains. Therefore, agricultural practices drive both direct, on-farm emissions, and indirect land use change emissions through yield effects. Here, we couple

Society & CultureSeptember 27, 2026

Cerebellar microcircuits enable robust evidence-based decisions through cortico-cerebellar coupling.

The cerebellum is increasingly implicated in perceptual decision-making, yet it remains unclear how the cerebellar cortex can support sparse evidence accumulation over behavioral time scales without assuming cortical-style dense local excitatory recurrence. We present a biologically constrained modeling framework showing that cerebellar microcircuits can implement graded accumulation and competition in the absence of such recurrence. In our model, type-II Purkinje-neuron excitability generates f

Society & CultureSeptember 25, 2026

Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias are typically described at two levels: the accumulation of molecular pathology and the emergence of cognitive impairment. Understanding the relationship between pathology, often studied in animal models, and human cognition will require measurements spanning intermediate scales, including single neurons, neuronal populations, and distributed networks. Here we combine longitudinal measurements of behavior and neuronal population activity with fluid and hi

Society & CultureSeptember 22, 2026

Deconstruction of lysergic acid diethylamide.

Of the classic psychedelics, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is perhaps the best-known, but its complex chemical architecture has limited synthetic investigations aimed at generating analogues with improved safety and efficacy profiles. Here, we systematically deconstruct the tetracyclic ergoline core of LSD to create 9 simplified ergoline analogues (i.e., ergologs) and evaluate them in pharmacological assays relevant to 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C receptor function. Our work revealed the key mo

Society & CultureSeptember 15, 2026

A role for self-regulatory control in the absence of ingroup preference.

One of psychology's most ubiquitous findings is that of robust ingroup preference, an explicitly stated human preference for the groups to which we belong. The advent of implicit measures of social cognition introduced a paradoxical result: Compared to members of higher-status groups, members of lower-status groups often show no implicit ingroup preference, sometimes even showing outgroup preference, a result rarely observed on explicit measures. Prevailing theories have provided macro-level acc