Electrifying the production of base and fine chemicals calls for the development of electrocatalytic methodologies for these transformations. We show here that the semihydrogenation of alkynes, an important transformation in organic synthesis, is electrocatalyzed at room temperature by a simple complex of earth-abundant nickel, [Ni­(bpy)3]2+. The approach operates under mild conditions and is selective toward the semihydrogenated olefins with good to very good Z isomer stereoselectivity. (Spectro)­electrochemistry supports that the electrocatalytic cycle is initiated in an atypical manner with a nickelacyclopropene complex, which upon further protonation is converted into a putative cationic Ni­(II)–vinyl intermediate that produces the olefin after electron–proton uptake. This work establishes a proof of concept for homogeneous electrocatalysis applied to alkyne semihydrogenation, with opportunities to improve the yields and stereoselectivity.

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Mobility allows social communities to become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. However, as users in such communities share huge amounts of personal data and contents, new challenges emerge with regard to privacy and trust. In this paper we motivate the necessity of advanced privacy enhancing concepts, especially for mobile communities and outline the approach of the PICOS project in order to elaborate such concepts. We explicate how we collected mobile community requirements and elaborated adequate concepts to address them. Finally, we conclude with details on how the concepts were prototypically implemented to demonstrate their feasibility, what distinguishes them from existing work, and how we intend to transfer the concepts to practice.

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