Researchers have devised a fabrication technique for one of the most exciting 2D materials in recent years that may finally take the compound from a lab bench to a range of industrial applications.

Chemical reactions are supposed to occur along their minimum energy paths. In recent years, so-called roaming reactions that stray far from this path have begun to be observed, but only for chemical species in their ground state or, at most, their first excited state. However, researchers have now observed a roaming reaction even in highly excited energy states.

The world's largest ethanol production equipment, with an annual output of 600,000 tonnes, went into trial on Thursday in Huaibei City, east China's Anhui Province.

Researchers have developed a strategy to disentangle the activity-selectivity tradeoff for direct conversion of syngas, a combination of primarily carbon monoxide and hydrogen, into desirable light olefins, which include ethylene, propylene and butylene, some of the most commonly used plastics precursors in the world.

Materials that can conduct negatively charged hydrogen atoms at ambient conditions would pave the way for advanced clean energy storage and electrochemical conversion technologies. A research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated a technique that enables a room-temperature all-solid-state hydride cell by introducing and exploiting defects in the lattice structure of rare earth hydrides.