The toxicity issue of lead hinders large-scale commercial production and photovoltaic field application of lead halide perovskites. Some novel non- or low-toxic perovskite materials have been explored for development of environmentally friendly lead-free perovskite solar cells (PSCs). This review studies the substitution of equivalent/heterovalent metals for Pb based on first-principles calculation, summarizes the theoretical basis of lead-free perovskites, and screens out some promising lead-free candidates with suitable bandgap, optical, and electrical properties. Then, it reports notable achievements for the experimental studies of lead-free perovskites to date, including the crystal structure and material bandgap for all of lead-free materials and photovoltaic performance and stability for corresponding devices. The review finally discusses challenges facing the successful development and commercialization of lead-free PSCs and predicts the prospect of lead-free PSCs in the future.

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Concern over water contamination by per/polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has highlighted the lack of effective treatment approaches. Photocatalysis offers advantages of using ambient conditions for reaction, air as the oxidant, and light as the energy source, but identifying photoactive materials is challenging. Herein, we report that boron nitride (BN) degrades PFOA upon irradiation with 254 nm light. The ability of BN to degrade PFOA photocatalytically has previously been unreported and is unexpected, because its band gap is too large for light absorption. On the basis of scavenger results, we suggest that PFOA degrades in the presence of BN via a hole-initiated reaction pathway similar to the TiO 2 case and involves superoxide/hydroperoxyl and hydroxyl radicals. We surmised that defects allow BN to absorb in the UVC range and to photogenerate reactive oxygen species. Sealed batch studies indicated BN was ∼2 and ∼4 times more active than TiO 2 , before and after ball milling the material, respectively. BN can be reused, showing no decrease in activity over three cycles. BN was active for the photocatalytic degradation of GenX, another PFAS of concern. These findings present fresh opportunities for materials design and for the re-evaluation of other wide band gap semiconductors for PFAS photocatalytic degradation.

In this paper, we present our latest progress in Emotion Recognition techniques, which combines acoustic features and facial features in both non-temporal and temporal mode. This paper presents the details of our techniques used in the Audio-Video Emotion Recognition subtask in the 2018 Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) Challenge. After the multimodal results fusion, our final accuracy in Acted Facial Expression in Wild (AFEW) test dataset achieves 61.87%, which is 1.53% higher than the best results last year. Such improvements prove the effectiveness of our methods.