Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect? | Hacker News Reader

Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect?

pubs.acs.org

69 pointsjhfdbkofdcho15 comments

I thought it was an odd choice of titles for the paper until I read "however, instead of using expensive and toxic chemicals such as ammonia, fluorine, chlorine, boranes, etc., we took a page from the pre-Haber–Bosch era and sought natural materials for the fertilization of graphene and used guano as a dopant".

They're literally doping graphene with crap to see if it increases the Electrocatalytic Effect. Hilarious! A great way to point out that the plethora of graphene doping papers is not well justified.

"It seems that whatever “crap” we put into graphene, electrocatalysis increases. One may exaggerate only a little by saying that if we spit on graphene it becomes a better electrocatalyst."

lol

I think I know what the next paper will be on...

Be sure to test dog slobber while you're at it.

I think what they've shown is that there's a lot of value in doing this basic research. Even their literally crappy additive created "much better electrocatalytic properties" than nondoped graphene. The plethora of research papers, with a large amount of information non-collated and hard to search through, seems to be the problem.

It's clear that there's a lot of problem space to search through. Many teams have created "Positive" results, but because each is it's own research paper, it is challenging to determine which result is the "best", and which results are deserving of further study. What I would take from this is that there's a need for a "standard" experiment in this space, and for many formulations and differences to be mapped, graphed, and compared. One paper encompassing a few hundred formulations, chosen in advance to explore the problem space and find directions, would be more useful. Follow-up papers would employ a search-pattern, increasing and decreasing the concentrations of dopants and hill climbing until optimal points are found or property-curves can be established.

No, they illustrate that what is needed is a proper theory to guide investigations, and that meanwhile some experimentalists mostly behave as if they found a "free paper" button and are abusing the hell out of it.

If you can put anything into graphene and get better electrocatalytic properties, then it doesn't make sense to publish any individual result about doping with "x" since that's just a subset of "anything". But if you do get a paper to put on the CV for a few weeks work, why would the fact that you are just doing redundant confirmation stop you?

It would have been doubly funny if they instead used B. taurus excrement. Specifically male.

Also a little disappointed it wasn't Chiroptera guano, because that'd be crazy.

They missed an excellent opportunity to call it BS doping as well.

This article is powerful.

"one can envision an era in which guano-doped graphene is used instead of platinum in fuel cells and electrolyzers, with huge societal impact not only in clean energy production and a cleaner environment but also on rural economies as guano once again becomes a valuable and highly sought-after product."

I need say no more.

Charles Mann's 1493 says that when people originally realized just how useful guano was for agricultural fertilizer, they started getting unfree labor to mine it on a massive scale (commonly from islands in the ocean). The paper's reference to Haber-Bosch is because we now instead get most of our fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen through industrial chemistry. If the demand for guano ever picks up again for some reason, I hope that the "forcing people to work in the mines" part doesn't come back with it.

Academia has became an routine extension of school.

In school, you learn to fill in the blanks. In today's academia, you find the weakest and most useless subject, but the easiest to 'improve' on, and then manually fill in the blanks.

Of course there are exceptionally bright people in both places, but what used to happen was that academia consisted of much more of them proportionately. Now most everyone can put crap into graphene and observe the increase of electrocatalytic effect.

And that is basic research. It may be dry, boring, and tedious but somebody has to do the legwork. Throwing machine learning at it won't change things much either. Applied ML has a last mile problem - eventually you still need somebody to supervise the wet lab experiments/machines and all not so glorious bits that would never be featured in Nature or Science.

I agree. My point being getting a larger sample size of things have diminishing returns, while being simple enough for most of the people to do it. With the end result of sizable expansion of the academia system without a corresponding increase in new advances. In fact, most of the things that are not theoretical in nature is already being spearheaded by the industry, likely for exactly that reason.

Given enough time the industry would accumulate institutional knowledge that creates a massive moat. The knowledge and experience is siloed up. Better have boring academia where everyone benefits than to continue feeding corporate titans.

> not so fantastic anymore and that we need to add something to it (i.e., a dopant) to make it great again.

Stopped reading here.

Your genuine loss dear user.

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