Guangxi University

High‐entropy amorphous catalysts (HEACs) integrate multielement synergy with structural disorder, making them promising candidates for water splitting. Their distinctive features—including flexible coordination environments, tunable electronic structures, abundant unsaturated active sites, and dynamic structural reassembly—collectively enhance electrochemical activity and durability under operating conditions. This review summarizes recent advances in HEACs for hydrogen evolution, oxygen evolution, and overall water splitting, highlighting their disorder-driven advantages over crystalline counterparts. Catalytic performance benchmarks are presented, and mechanistic insights are discussed, focusing on how multimetallic synergy, amorphization effect, and in‐situ reconstruction cooperatively regulate reaction pathways. These insights provide guidance for the rational design of next‐generation amorphous high‐entropy electrocatalysts with improved efficiency and durability.

Mercury ion (Hg²⁺) pollution poses severe environmental and health risks, necessitating the development of highly sensitive and reliable detection methods. Although ratiometric and genetically encoded fluorescent probes each offer distinct advantages, their integration for Hg²⁺ sensing remains largely unexplored. Herein, we report the rational design of a novel ratiometric genetically encoded fluorescent probe through the fusion of a circularly permuted green fluorescent protein (cpEGFP), a mercury-binding domain (MerBD), and a large Stokes shift reference fluorescent protein (LSSmOrange). This probe enables self-calibrated Hg²⁺ quantification by measuring the fluorescence intensity ratio of the response channel (F₅₁₂) to the stable reference channel (F₅₇₂), which effectively minimizes interferences from probe concentration, environmental fluctuations, and instrumental variations. The probe exhibits an ultra-high affinity for Hg²⁺ (apparent K_d' = 2.71 × 10^-13 M) and a detection limit of 4 nM, alongside long-term stability and high selectivity against most common metal ions. Competitive titration, circular dichroism, and fluorescence lifetime analyses reveal that the probe operates through a cooperative conformational-change mechanism, which translates picomolar-level binding into a nanomolar-level fluorescence response. This work not only addresses a critical gap in ratiometric genetically encoded probes for Hg²⁺ but also provides a robust and versatile platform for accurate Hg²⁺ monitoring in environmental and biological systems.

Anion redox reactions in layered cathode materials have attracted significant attention due to their remarkable potential to enhance the capacity and energy density of lithium-ion batteries. However, in conventional sulfide-based cathodes such as Li_xTiS₂, anionic redox is only partially reversible at high voltages and suffers from rapid capacity fading. These challenges primarily originate from the intrinsic electronic band structure of Li_xTiS₂, where the Ti³⁺/Ti⁴⁺ redox couple lies far above the S 3p band, suppressing ligand-to-metal charge transfer during Li⁺(de)intercalation. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a bandgap-engineering strategy via partial substitution of Ti³⁺ with Cr³⁺, effectively narrowing the d-p bandgap and activating sustainable sulfur redox chemistry. The Cr-substituted compound, Li_0.80Cr_0.67Ti_0.33S₂, exhibits sustainable sulfur redox activity, thereby achieving a higher capacity of 223.0 mA h g^-1 and nearly doubling the energy density of pristine Li_0.80TiS₂. Furthermore, Li_0.80Cr_0.67Ti_0.33S₂ preserves its layered framework throughout the whole (de)lithiation process, indicating effective suppression of structural collapse during sulfur redox. Therefore, it demonstrates outstanding rate performance (77.5% capacity retention at 5.0C) and excellent long-term cycling stability (80% retention after 330 cycles), significantly outperforming its undoped counterpart. These findings highlight the critical role of ligand-metal d-p orbital overlap in enabling and stabilizing sustainable sulfur redox, providing valuable insights for the design of high-performance cathodes for next-generation lithium-ion batteries.