Energy shortage, environmental crisis, and developing customer demands have driven people to find facile, low-cost, environmentally friendly, and nontoxic routes to produce novel functional materials that can be commercialized in the near future. Amongst various techniques, the hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) process of biomass (either of isolated carbohydrates or crude plants) is a promising candidate for the synthesis of novel carbon-based materials with a wide variety of potential applications. In this Review, we will discuss various synthetic routes towards such novel carbon-based materials or composites via the HTC process of biomass. Furthermore, factors that influence the carbonization process will be analyzed and the special chemical/physical properties of the final products will be discussed. Despite the lack of a clear mechanism, these novel carbonaceous materials have already shown promising applications in many fields such as carbon fixation, water purification, fuel cell catalysis, energy storage, CO(2) sequestration, bioimaging, drug delivery, and gas sensors. Some of the most promising examples will also be discussed here, demonstrating that the HTC process can rationally design a rich family of carbonaceous and hybrid functional carbon materials with important applications in a sustainable fashion.

The anode oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is knownt ol argely limit the efficiency of electrolyzerso wing to its sluggish kinetics.W hile crystalline metal oxides are promising as OER catalysts,t heir amorphous phases also show high activities.E fforts to produce amorphous metal oxides have progressed slowly, and how an amorphous structure benefits the catalytic performances remains elusive. Now the first scalable synthesis of amorphous NiFeMo oxide (up to 515 gi no ne batch) is presented with homogeneous elemental distribution via afacile supersaturated co-precipitation method. In contrast to its crystalline counterpart, amorphous NiFeMo oxide undergoes af aster surface self-reconstruction process during OER, forming am etal oxy(hydroxide) active layer with rich oxygen vacancies,leading to superior OER activity (280 mV overpotential at 10 mA cm À2 in 0.1m KOH). This opens up the potential of fast, facile,a nd scaleup production of amorphous metal oxides for high-performance OER catalysts.

A stretchable and multiple-force-sensitive electronic fabric based on stretchable coaxial sensor electrodes is fabricated for artificial-skin application. This electronic fabric, with only one kind of sensor unit, can simultaneously map and quantify the mechanical stresses induced by normal pressure, lateral strain, and flexion.