For these reasons, various types of SiC x hollow structures having shells, tubes, and sheets can be synthesized by simply employing different morphologies of the carbon template. As a result, the morphological effect of different hollow structures can be deeply investigated as well as the free volume effect originating from void engineering from both a electrochemical and computational point of view. In terms of selective thermal oxidation, the SiC x hollow shell achieves a much higher initial Coulombic efficiency (>89%) than that of the Si hollow shell (65%) because of its nonoxidative property originating from structural characteristics of SiC x during thermal etching. Moreover, the findings based on the clearly observed different electrochemical features between half-cell and full-cell configuration give insight into further Si anode research.Glycolate is an important α-hydroxy acid with a wide range of industrial applications. The current industrial production of glycolate mainly depends on chemical synthesis, but biochemical production from renewable resources using engineered microorganisms is increasingly viewed as an attractive alternative. Crude glycerol is an abundant byproduct of biodiesel production and a widely investigated potential sustainable feedstock. Here, we constructed a novel biosynthetic pathway for the production of glycolate from glycerol in Escherichia coli. The pathway starts from the oxidation of glycerol to d-glycerate by alditol oxidase, followed by sequential enzymatic dehydrogenation and decarboxylation as well as reduction reactions. We screened and characterized the catalytic activity of candidate enzymes, and a variant of alditol oxidase from Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2), 2-hydroxyglutarate-pyruvate transhydrogenase from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, α-ketoisovalerate decarboxylase from Lactococcus lactis, and aldehyde dehydrogenase from Escherichia coli were selected and assembled to create an artificial operon for the biosynthetic production of glycolate from glycerol. We also characterized the native strong constitutive promoter Plpp from E. coli and compared it with the PT7 promoter, which was employed to express the artificial operon on the plasmid pSC105-ADKA. To redirect glycerol flux toward glycolate synthesis, we deleted key genes of the native glycerol assimilation pathways and other branches of native E. coli metabolism, and we introduced a second plasmid expressing Dld3 to reduce the accumulation of the intermediate d-glycerate. Finally, the engineered strain TZ-108 harboring pSC105-ADKA and pACYC184-Plpp-Dld3 produced 0.64 g/L glycolate in shake flasks, which was increased to 4.74 g/L in fed-batch fermentation. This study provides an alternative pathway for glycolate synthesis and demonstrates the potential for producing other commodity chemicals by redesigning glycerol metabolism.The surface, interface, and bulk properties are a few of the most critical factors that influence the performance of perovskite solar cells. The photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) is used as a technique to analyze these properties. However, the information depth of PES is limited to 10-20 nm, which makes it not suitable to study the complete devices, which have a thickness of ∼1 μm. Here, we introduce a novel and simple technique of PES on a tapered cross section (TCS-PES). It provides both lateral and vertical resolutions compared to the conventional PES so that it is suitable to study a complete perovskite solar cell. It offers many benefits over conventional PES methods such as the chemical composition in the micrometer scale from the surface to the bulk and the electronic properties at the multiple interfaces. The chemical natures of different layers of the perovskite-based solar cells [(FAPbI3)0.85(MAPbBr3)0.15] can be identified precisely for the first time using the TCS-PES method. We found that the perovskite layer has higher iodine concentration at the Spiro/perovskite interface and higher bromine concentration at the TiO2/perovskite interface. UPS measurements on the tapered cross section revealed that the perovskite is n-type, and the solar cell studied here is a p-n-n structure type device. The unique possibilities to analyze the complete solar cell by XPS and UPS allow us to estimate the band bending in a working solar cell. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/oprozomib-onx-0912.html Moreover, this technique can further be used to study the device under operating conditions, and it can be applied in other solid-state devices like solid electrolyte Li-ion batteries, LEDs, or photoelectrodes.Engineering useful mechanical properties into stimuli-responsive soft materials without compromising their responsiveness is, in many cases, an unresolved challenge. For example, polymer networks formed within blue-phase liquid crystals (BPs) have been shown to form mechanically robust films, but the impact of polymer networks on the response of these soft materials to chemical stimuli has not been explored. Here, we report on the response of polymer-stabilized BPs (PSBPs) to volatile organic compounds (VOCs, using toluene as a model compound) and compare the response to BPs without polymer stabilization and to polymerized nematic and cholesteric phases. We find that PSBPs generate an optical response to toluene vapor (change in reflection intensity under crossed polars) that is sixfold greater in sensitivity than the polymerized nematic or cholesteric phases and with a limit of detection (140 ± 10 ppm at 25 °C) that is relevant to the measurement of permissible exposure limits for humans. Additionally, when compared to BPs that have not been polymerized, PSBPs respond to a broader range of toluene vapor concentrations (5000 vs less then 1000 ppm) over a wider temperature interval (25-45 vs 45-53 °C). We place these experimental observations into the context of a simple thermodynamic model to explore how the PSBP response reflects the effect of toluene on competing contributions of double-twisted LC cylinders, disclinations, and polymer network to the free energy that controls the PSBP lattice spacing. Overall, we conclude that the mechanical and thermal stability of PSBPs, when combined with their optical responsiveness to toluene, make this class of self-supporting LCs a promising one as the basis of passive and compact (e.g., wearable) sensors for VOCs.