Several features of marine energy, including large reserves, sustainable utilization, environmental friendliness, make it a promising area of exploration. In recent years, the progress in the material sciences has promoted a rapid development of materials that are vital for the conversion, storage, and transmission of renewable marine energy. However, the excessively large restrictions that are placed on materials used in marine environments have given an impetus to continued studies in this area. Thus far, few reports exist that categorize and integrate the types and requirements of materials that are employed for capturing, converting and storing marine energy. The goal of this review is to provide a detailed description of advanced materials that have been developed for use in these purposes. The review contains sections that cover materials used in (1) the capture and conversion of energy arising from ocean phenomena including tidal, wave and current fluctuations, and thermal and salinity gradients, (2) systems for the transmission of marine energy derived power including submarine cables and hydrogen production, and (3) electrodes for lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors for marine energy storage and utilization. Finally, the review contains a brief discussion of shortcomings of materials used currently for marine energy purposes, and proposals that could advance the industrialization of power generation using marine energy sources.

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) has been a vibrant research frontier at the intersection of chiral chemistry and photophysics, driven by its potential applications in three-dimensional displays, information encryption, biological sensing, and advanced photonic technologies. Although numerous reviews have summarized CPL materials according to specific material classes or application scenarios, a unified framework that correlates molecular chirality, structural amplification, and dynamic regulation across different platforms remains less systematically summarized. In this review, we move beyond a material-by-material description and establish a coherent molecular design-assembly regulation-stimuli response perspective to integrate recent advances in CPL-active systems. Organic materials are discussed from the viewpoint of intrinsic versus induced chirality, spanning chiral luminophores and achiral luminophores that acquire supramolecular chirality, and further extended to functional architectures including aggregation-induced emission luminogens, polymers, liquid crystals, and covalent organic frameworks. Metal-based systems are comparatively analyzed with respect to their distinct photophysical origins, encompassing lanthanide and transition-metal complexes, metal clusters, and metal-organic frameworks, which frequently exhibit high photoluminescence quantum yields and enhanced dissymmetry factors. Particular emphasis is placed on stimuli-responsive regulation strategies, where external triggers, such as solvent, temperature, pH, light irradiation, mechanical force, and electric fields, enable reversible CPL switching, handedness inversion, and amplification through mechanisms including conformational transformation, hierarchical assembly/disassembly, and energy-transfer modulation. By highlighting cross-platform commonalities in chiral information generation, transfer, and amplification, this review aims to clarify structural-photophysical correlations that transcend individual material systems. Finally, current challenges and future directions are discussed, underscoring the necessity of rational design principles to simultaneously achieve high |g_lum| and high quantum efficiency, as well as the development of smart and dynamically controllable CPL materials for practical implementation in photonic and information technologies.

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is essential to the operation of various renewable energy technologies, particularly in water electrolysis and fuel cells. Nevertheless, the broad application of benchmark materials derived from iridium (Ir) and ruthenium (Ru) is seriously hindered by their scarcity. Owing to their abundance, sustainability, and tunable properties, metal-free materials have been regarded as potential alternative options to traditional metal-based electrocatalysts for OER. This review comprehensively overviews recent advancements in metal-free materials for electrocatalytic OER, focusing on their design strategies, catalytic mechanisms, and performance evaluation. Different types of metal-free OER catalysts, including carbon-based materials, carbon nitrides, and organic materials are discussed in detail. Additionally, recent progress in understanding the structure-activity relationships and approaches to enhancing their catalytic performance is highlighted. Finally, the challenges and future prospects in the realm of metal-free OER catalysts are critically presented, providing valuable insights into potential directions for future research endeavors.

Direct electrosynthesis of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) from seawater holds promising prospects for advancing the marine industries. However, the catalysts face severe challenges arising from sluggish oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) kinetics and poor stability under neutral and corrosive chloride ion (Cl⁻) conditions of seawater. Herein, we introduce a curvature and microenvironment co-engineering strategy by constructing a pentagon-defect-enriched and interconnected spherical-architecture carbon (PD/IS-C). The pentagon defects induce geometric curvature and electronic rearrangement, thus enhancing ORR kinetics, while the interconnected nanospherical channels facilitate mass transfer to create a local alkaline microenvironment that repels Cl⁻, improving stability. Benefiting from this dual regulation, the PD/IS-C catalyst achieves outstanding 2e⁻ ORR performance in seawater, delivering an ultrahigh H₂O₂ yield rate of 67.1 mol g_cat⁻¹ h⁻¹, ~90% Faraday efficiency, and more than 300 h of operational stability. Moreover, the PD/IS-C electrode achieves the coupling of seawater H₂O₂ electrosynthesis with real aquaculture practice for the first time, significantly improving the survival rate of fish. This work demonstrates curvature–microenvironment co-engineering as a powerful design paradigm for robust seawater electrosynthesis and applications.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered robots increasingly rely on advanced tactile sensors to perceive and interpret complex mechanical cues, enabling intelligent interaction with real-world environments. However, most existing tactile sensing systems rely on different sensing mechanisms to achieve static and dynamic perception, which increases system complexity. In this work, we present the self-powered intrinsic Tactile-Dual mode (iTD) Sensor—an intrinsically multimodal triboelectric platform that integrates material recognition and dual-mode (static/dynamic) pressure sensing within a single sensor device. A microstructured polytetrafluoroethylene powder layer, introduced via scalable spray-coating, endows the sensor with high sensing resolution and strong moisture resistance. The iTD Sensor intrinsically decouples static and dynamic signals without auxiliary circuitry, allowing for efficient and complementary tactile data acquisition. Leveraging these signals, a convolutional neural network model achieves material classification with 99.08% accuracy. For pressure sensing, the iTD Sensor exhibits high sensitivities across static (< 3 kPa, 7.62 V kPa⁻¹; 3–30 kPa, 0.59 V kPa⁻¹) and dynamic (< 5 kPa, 5.56 V kPa⁻¹; 5–30 kPa, 0.30 V kPa⁻¹) regimes. Integrated onto a robotic fingertip, the sensor enables accurate recognition of real-world objects and surface textures, achieving classification accuracies of 98.75% and 99.38%, respectively. This work provides a compact, scalable, and AI-compatible tactile sensing solution for intelligent robots operating in complex environments.

Manganese-based cathode materials hold great promise for aqueous zinc-ion batteries (AZIBs) due to their high operating voltage and low cost. Among these, manganese dioxide (MnO₂) cathodes exhibit particularly promising electrochemical characteristics but face critical challenges including insufficient electrical conductivity and rapid capacity fading. To address these issues, manganese oxyhydroxide (MnOOH) and α-MnO₂ have been studied. MnOOH offers excellent cycling stability but suffers from a relatively low specific capacity, whereas α-MnO₂ delivers high specific capacity but exhibits poor cycling stability. A rationally designed MnOOH/α-MnO₂ composite was synthesized via a crystal phase transformation method, using δ-MnO₂ as the precursor. The composite features a unique nanowire and nanorod morphology and is employed as a cathode material for AZIBs. It outperforms its individual components, achieving a high specific capacity of 233.4 mAh g⁻¹ after 750 cycles at 1 A g⁻¹. At an elevated current density of 2 A g⁻¹, it maintains a stable specific capacity of 85.0 mAh g⁻¹ after 17,000 cycles. Comprehensive mechanistic investigations reveal that the zinc storage process involves the co-intercalation/extraction of Zn²⁺ and H⁺ ions, coupled with reversible MnO₂ dissolution and redeposition. These findings highlight the potential of MnOOH/α-MnO₂ composites as high-performance cathode materials for AZIBs, effectively addressing the challenges of capacity limitation and cycling stability.

Wearable motion recognition holds significant promise in rehabilitation medicine and human–machine interaction. However, they face challenges like signal susceptibility to interference and limited back-end processing capabilities. This work reports a novel embedded artificial intelligence-enabled sensor cluster featuring high assembly flexibility, good anti-interference ability, and sensor nodes that autonomously process data, enabling real-time recognition of multiple joint movements. Polyvinylidene fluoride-based membranes for piezoelectric sensors exhibit high piezoelectric properties due to interface enhancement mechanisms resulting from hot-pressing and rapid annealing. The well-designed differential structure enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of the piezoelectric sensor to 72.5 dB, outperforming other reported polymer-based flexible piezoelectric sensors (31 dB). The single-joint recognition system used to build the cluster is equipped with a 12-channel sensor array and a miniaturized signal-conditioning circuit, which can real-time recognize 20 different joint movements via a lightweight convolutional neural network model deployed on a microcontroller. Finally, the distributed multijoint motion recognition cluster adopted a one-master-multiple-slaves architecture and multipoint wireless collaboration to synchronously recognize motions of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. This work provides guidance for constructing motion recognition systems based on piezoresistive, piezoelectric, capacitive, and triboelectric principles.

The development of efficient electrocatalysts for the alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) remains a key challenge for hydrogen energy conversion. Here, we report a Cu-substituted Ru nanoparticle catalyst in which atomically dispersed Cu (0.31 wt%) is substituted into Ru nanoparticles (3.54 wt%) supported on oxygen-deficient ceria (Cu₁–Ru/CeO_x). This catalyst exhibits outstanding alkaline HER performance, delivering a low overpotential of 47 mV at 10 mA cm⁻², a small Tafel slope of 43 mV dec⁻¹, and a high mass activity exceeding 3.0 A mg_Ru^-1, outperforming commercial Pt/C. The catalyst retains 95% of its initial activity after 100 h of continuous operation. Spectroscopic, structural, and DFT analyses reveal an asymmetric interfacial charge distribution: charge transfer from Cu to Ru generates electron-rich Ru and electron-deficient Cu₁, while electron donation from Ru to ceria forms Ce³⁺ and oxygen vacancies. This tri-functional interface enables efficient water dissociation at Ce³⁺–O_v sites, optimized hydroxyl adsorption/desorption on electron-rich Ru, and weakened H binding on electron-deficient Cu₁, thereby promoting H₂ release. When paired with a RuO₂ anode, the Cu₁–Ru/CeO_x(−)║RuO₂(+) electrolyzer surpasses Pt/C(−)║RuO₂(+) in full-cell efficiency and long-term stability, highlighting the importance of interfacial charge modulation and multi-site cooperativity in alkaline HER catalysis.

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting is often constrained by interfacial recombination and sluggish oxygen evolution, highlighting the importance of constructing efficient catalytic junctions on photoanodes. Here, we report that a brief PEC activation restructures a photodeposited NiFe oxyhydroxide layer on In₂S₃ into a self-optimized catalytic interface through sacrificial Ni leaching-induced interfacial reconstruction. Activation triggers selective Ni leaching and simultaneous surface porosification, generating an amorphous FeOOH-like overlayer that is intimately coupled to the sulfide surface. Spectroscopic, kinetic, and theoretical analyses indicate that reconstruction strengthens electronic coupling, suppresses carrier recombination, and lowers charge-transfer resistance at both the semiconductor/cocatalyst and cocatalyst/electrolyte interfaces. Consequently, the activated photoanode delivers 9.58 mA cm⁻² at 1.23 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode, placing its performance among the best reported for oxide and sulfide photoanodes under comparable conditions. Beyond performance enhancement, this work highlights operando interface reconstruction as a powerful route for transforming static cocatalyst contacts into dynamically optimized catalytic junctions, providing new insights for the design of high-efficiency solar water oxidation systems.