Publications related to Superior visible light-mediated catalytic activity of a novel N-doped, Fe3O4-incorporating MgO nanosheet in presence of PMS: Imidacloprid degradation and implications on simultaneous bacterial inactivation

Photogeneration of Hydrogen: Insights from a Pt(II)-Complex Incorporated into a Covalent Organic Framework

Pt(II)-based molecular catalysts stand as a prototypical system in hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) owing to their consistently elevated activity levels. Their integration into heterogeneous systems thus provides an ideal platform to develop catalytic ma ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag2024

Oxidation processes and me

Urs von Gunten

This publication summarizes my journey in the field of chemical oxidation processes for water treatment over the last 30+ years. Initially, the efficiency of the application of chemical oxidants for micropollutant abatement was assessed by the abatement of ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Revealing the Structure of Tryptophan in Microhydrated Complexes by Cold Ion Spectroscopy

Oleg Boyarkine, Natalia Nagornova, Manuel Dömer, Andrei Zviagin, Ruslan Yamaletdinov

The geometry of biomolecules isolated in the gas phaseusuallydiffers substantially from their native structures in aqueous solution,which are the only ones truly relevant to life science. To connectthe high resolution of cold ion spectroscopy that can be a ...

2023

Bacterial inactivation in sunlit surface waters is dominated by reactive species that emanate from the synergy between light, iron, and natural organic matter

César Pulgarin, Stefanos Giannakis, Jun Ma, Da Wang, Shuang Song

In this study, the synergistic and antagonistic effects of Fe species and coexisting natural organic matter (NOM) on the efficacy of solar light disinfection of water are investigated. Different initial iron species (Fe2+/Fe3+) and naturalorganic matter ty ...

Elsevier2023

Sunshine and a pinch of tropical soils: A natural, low-cost photo-Fenton variation for safer water, assisted by H2O2 or percabonate

Michaël Bensimon, César Pulgarin, Stefanos Giannakis, Jérémie Decker, Thomas Guillaume

Clean water is essential for human survival, but access to safe drinking water remains a challenge in resource -limited regions. Herein, we explored a low-cost but effective solution for water potabilization using natural iron sources from soils along with ...

ELSEVIER2023

Creating the conditions for Western European petroculture: The Marshall Plan, the politics of the OEEC, and the transition from coal to oil

Nicolas Christophe Chachereau

In the postwar years, petroleum products pervaded more and more aspects of Western European life. In this article, we study the origins of this pervasive petroculture through the lens of the Marshall Plan/European Recovery Program (ERP), its Refinery Expan ...

2023

Why five decades of massive research on heterogeneous photocatalysis, especially on TiO2, has not yet driven to water disinfection and detoxification applications? Critical review of drawbacks and challenges

César Pulgarin, Julian Andrés Rengifo Herrera

For fifty years, heterogeneous photocatalysis has been considered as having potential to remove organic and microbiological pollutants from water under either artificial UV light or sunlight irradiation. However, after tens of thousands of published resear ...

Elsevier Science Sa2023

Untangling the influence of Antarctic and Southern Ocean life on clouds

Jenny Thomas, Julia Schmale, Hélène Paule Angot, Markus Frey

Polar environments are among the fastest changing regions on the planet. It is a crucial time to make significant improvements in our understanding of how ocean and ice biogeochemical processes are linked with the atmosphere. This is especially true over A ...

2023

Oxidative Water Treatment: The Track Ahead

Urs von Gunten, Yun Ho Lee

Chemical oxidation has been applied in municipal water treatment for more than a century, initially for disinfection. In the early decades, chlorine disinfection was adopted in the fight against waterborne disease. However, the oxidative properties of chlo ...

2023

Mechanistic insights on interactions of dissolved organic matter with chemical oxidants: quantification of reactive sites and identification of oxidation byproducts

Joanna Maria Houska

Chemical oxidants including ozone (O3), chlorine (HOCl/OCl-) and chlorine dioxide (ClO2) are applied for disinfection of drinking water. To cope with water scarcity and the increased risks associated with the presence of micropollutants, water treatment sy ...

EPFL2023

Organocatalytic Enantioselective Pictet–Spengler Reaction of α‐Ketoesters: Development and Application to the Total Synthesis of (+)‐Alstratine A

Qian Wang, Jieping Zhu, Rémi Julien Sylvain Andres, Fenggang Sun

We report herein an asymmetric Pictet– Spengler reaction of α-ketoesters. In the presence of a catalytic amount of simple alanine-derived squaramide and p-nitrobenzoic acid, reaction of tryptamines with methyl 2-oxoalkanoates afforded the corresponding 1- ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2023

Electromagnetic Forces and Torques: From Dielectrophoresis to Optical Tweezers

Olivier Martin, Marco Riccardi

Electromagnetic forces and torques enable many key technologies, including optical tweezers or dielectrophoresis. Interestingly, both techniques rely on the same physical process: the interaction of an oscillating electric field with a particle of matter. ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Electro- and photochemical H-2 generation by Co(ii) polypyridyl-based catalysts bearing ortho-substituted pyridines

Rosario Scopelliti, Euro Solari, Albert Ruggi, Vincent Artero, Fiorella Lucarini

Cobalt(II) complexes featuring hexadentate amino-pyridyl ligands have been recently discovered as highly active catalysts for the Hydrogen Evolution Reaction (HER), whose high performance arises from the possibility of assisting proton transfer processes v ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Inactivation of coxsackievirus B5 by free chlorine under conditions relevant to drinking water treatment

Shotaro Torii

Chlorine disinfection is commonly applied to inactivate pathogenic viruses in drinking water treatment plants. However, the role of water quality in chlorine disinfection of viruses has not been investigated thoughtfully. In this study, we investigated the ...

IWA PUBLISHING2023

Berry curvature dipole generation and helicity-to-spin conversion at symmetry-mismatched heterointerfaces

Peng Chen, Xupeng Yang

The Berry curvature dipole (BCD) is a key parameter that describes the geometric nature of energy bands in solids. It defines the dipole-like distribution of Berry curvature in the band structure and plays a key role in emergent nonlinear phenomena. The th ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Quality-Constrained Encoding Optimization for Omnidirectional Video Streaming

Pascal Frossard, Roberto Gerson De Albuquerque Azevedo, Chaofan He

Omnidirectional video streaming is usually implemented based on the representations of tiles, where the tiles are obtained by splitting the video frame into several rectangular areas and each tile is converted into multiple representations with different r ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2023

Social isolation shortens lifespan through oxidative stress in ants

Alessandro Crespi, Laurent Keller

Social isolation negatively affects health, induces detrimental behaviors, and shortens lifespan in social species. Little is known about the mechanisms underpinning these effects because model species are typically short-lived and non-social. Using coloni ...

Nature Research2023

Protein target highlights in CASP15: Analysis of models by structure providers

Bruno Lemaitre, Luciano Andres Abriata, Kuan-Lin Wu, Samuel Rommelaere, Han Xiao

We present an in-depth analysis of selected CASP15 targets, focusing on their biological and functional significance. The authors of the structures identify and discuss key protein features and evaluate how effectively these aspects were captured in the su ...

WILEY2023

Molecular engineering of low-cost, efficient, and stable photosensitizers for dye-sensitized solar cells

Michael Graetzel, Shaik Mohammed Zakeeruddin, Marina Freitag, Jing Gao, Felix Thomas Eickemeyer, Zhongjin Shen, Lukas Pfeifer

The cost, stability, and photovoltaic performance of photosensi-tizers play a key role in the commercialization of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). Herein, three novel sensitizers termed ZS10, ZS11, and ZS12 are described based on the simple chemical str ...

Cell Press2023

Voltage-driven Reactivity of Liquid Ga and CuGa Nanoparticles for Electrocatalytic CO2 Reduction and Synthesis

Valery Okatenko

The rising atmospheric level of carbon dioxide, CO2, contributes to climate change and poses urgent need to find scalable solutions both to decrease its emissions and to be able to recycle it, if the goals of Paris Agreement to limit the temperature rise a ...

EPFL2023