Volume 1 Issue 4, April 2024

The existential threat posed by the climate crisis calls for urgent solutions to manage hard-to-abate and unavoidable CO₂ emissions. This Comment shows, by example, the key role that scientists can play in launching pioneering pilot projects, leveraging their research, systems understanding and networks, and thus educating the next generation of climate innovators.

Junwang Tang and Binhang Yan discuss the role of the Industrial Catalysis Center at Tsinghua University and their perspectives on modern industrial catalysis with Nature Chemical Engineering.

The carbon footprints of petrochemicals have large uncertainties, challenging decarbonization efforts. Now, a study identifies the main uncertainty sources and strategies for improving the accuracy of greenhouse gas emissions estimations and reporting for petrochemicals.

Electric fields offer an easy means to manipulate liquid metal droplets. Now, directed droplet transfer between immersed electrodes is achieved in an alkaline electrolyte without electrical short circuit.

Liquid–liquid extraction is an indirect separation technique requiring solvent regeneration, and if a back-extraction is needed, it typically reduces the concentration. Now, using an electrochemical reaction, the concentration can be pumped up to 16 times the feed concentration.

Properly maintaining the skin temperature is critical for wound healing, especially outdoors. Now, a lightweight and skin-friendly wound dressing is reported that can continuously cool the skin without energy input.

The recovery of gold and platinum group metals from sources like electronic waste, catalytic converter waste and mining streams remains challenging. Now, an electrochemically mediated liquid–liquid extraction process leverages the selectivity of redox-active extractants for the selective recovery of precious and critical metals including gold and platinum group metals from diverse feedstocks.

Positively charged anodes should short circuit when they are brought into contact with a cathode. The authors demonstrate that a liquid-metal anode can naturally flow toward the cathode, completely surround it and ultimately transfer to the cathode without short circuiting in an electrochemical cell.

It is essential to develop new dressing designs for wounds that can maintain ideal thermal comfort even under high temperatures in outdoor conditions. Now, a daytime radiative cooling dressing based on a polyamide 6/silk fibroin bilayer is demonstrated to accelerate wound healing by reducing the thermal load for skin wounds under sunlight illumination.

Robust decarbonization strategies for the petrochemical industry are hampered by many sources of uncertainty in greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Here the authors quantify and prioritize uncertainty sources, finding that the most significant factor is the lack of detailed data about specific production processes used in chemical facilities.

An appreciation of characteristic timescales can save quite a lot of effort, as Ian Wilson explains.