
Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect? - jhfdbkofdcho
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184#
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eloff
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.

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GauntletWizard
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.

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SiempreViernes
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?

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PeterisP
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.

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schoen
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.

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Aperocky
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.

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ampdepolymerase
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.

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Aperocky
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.

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ampdepolymerase
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.

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ninkendo
> 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.

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SiempreViernes
Your genuine loss dear user.

