Fenton reactions that activate H2O2 by using Fe2+ have emerged as a hot topic in environmental remediation. The sluggish regeneration of the active Fe2+ from Fe3+ remains the key limitation. As recently reported in Angewandte Chemie, Xing and co-workers have developed a MoS2-based heterogeneous co-catalyst that can significantly overcome this limitation and improve the overall efficiency.

In this issue of Chem, Veenstra et al. combine an advanced catalyst fabrication and computational simulations to reveal how the local reaction environment affects the selectivity of CO2 electroreduction on Cu. The model microstructured catalyst with a well-defined architecture provides an ideal platform for fundamental investigation of the structure-property correlation.

In a recent issue of Nature Chemistry, Jishan Wu and co-workers reported the hexacation species of a 3D conjugated molecular cage whose 50 π-electrons follow Hirsch’s rule of 3D aromaticity. We show how Hirsch’s rule connects hydrogenoid atoms, the (unprepared) decacation of the C60 fullerene, and the Wu group’s hexacation.

Kenry was a research fellow at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he obtained his PhD. His research focuses on functional nanomaterials for theranostics and nanomedicine. He is currently a research fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Ben Zhong Tang received his BS and PhD degrees from South China University of Technology and Kyoto University, respectively

Xinggui Gu received his PhD from the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and conducted his postdoctoral research at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. In 2017, he became a professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology. Deqing Zhang is currently a research professor at the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from Ruprecht-Karls

Increasing the rate of polymerization while decreasing the molecular weight distribution and maintaining well-defined chain ends remains one of the most challenging problems of macromolecular synthesis. In this issue of Chem, the Anastasaki laboratory demonstrates that mixed-RAFT agents provide a living radical polymerization that makes a very important step toward this goal.

In this issue of Chem, Michael Aziz, Roy Gordon, and collaborators report soluble, functionalized anthraquinones that serve to deactivate and recover from chemical reactions that lead to capacity fade in organic redox flow battery electrolytes. The result is an unprecedented low rate of capacity fade of < 1% per year.

In this issue of Cell Reports Physical Science, Pan and co-workers synthesize alkylcatecholboranes that can be oxidized by oxygen to drive the release of carbon-centered radicals for initiating reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization. These organoboranes can slowly decompose to radicals that enable RAFT polymerization with exceptional control yielding ultra-high molecular

Catalyst-controlled site selectivity in C−H functionalization reactions is a long-standing challenge. In this issue of Chem, Larrosa and co-workers employ a cyclometalated ruthenium catalyst (RuBnN) to reverse the conventional meta-selectivity to the unprecedented ortho-selectivity in the C(sp2)−H alkylation of arenes with secondary alkyl halides.

Recent work published in Science by Arndtsen and co-workers reports a novel excited-state palladium-catalyzed carbonylation. The key to success was both oxidative addition and reductive elimination steps accelerated by visible light, which allowed challenging aryl or alkyl halides and difficult nucleophiles as reaction partners.

A hollow multi-shelled structure (HoMS) with temporal-spatial ordering was reported recently in National Science Review by Wang et al. An exciting example of its application is for sequential light harvesting demonstrating substantially increased quantum efficiency. This breakthrough has opened opportunity for promising applications in energy conversion, storage, catalysis, and biosensing.

Mechanical twisting of amides is anticipated to enhance their reactivity considerably. Recent work published in Nature Chemistry by Fujita and co-workers demonstrates that reactive non-planar amide conformers can be bound inside a self-assembled coordination cage. The twisted amides are stabilized by the rigid cavity of the cage and are thus up to 14 times more reactive toward hydrolysis under basic

Machine learning for chemistry requires a strategy for representing (featurizing) molecules. In this issue of Chem, Sandfort et al. describe an approach that concatenates 24 fingerprint representations into 71,375-dimensional vectors, which are then used for a variety of supervised learning tasks related to chemical reactivity.

In this issue of Chem, Liu, Li, and co-workers report the synergistic use of copper and photoredox catalysis to reveal a general platform to form C(sp3)–S bonds via redox-active esters of abundantly available aliphatic carboxylic acids with organosulfinates under mild conditions.

Highly efficient access to structurally diverse branched tertiary amines is a long-standing challenge in synthetic chemistry. In a recent paper published in Nature, Gaunt and co-workers disclose a practical strategy for the construction of synthetically intractable tertiary amines through visible-light-mediated radical carbonyl alkylative amination of aldehydes, amines, and alkyl halides.

Two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials have attracted increasing interest because of their compelling physicochemical properties and promising applications. Recent studies have demonstrated that phases of nanomaterials could significantly affect their properties and applications because of the distinct atomic arrangements. Besides crystalline phases, the amorphous nanomaterials, which lack long-range atomic

2D covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have received considerable attention because of their crystallinity, permanent porosity, and tunability, yet they exhibit low in-plane conductivity. In this issue of Chem, Fischer and co-workers report an approach for growing 2D COF thin films featuring high in-plane conductivity for potential use in organic electronics.

In this issue of Chem, Cheng and Perez-Mercader use the dissipative assembly of amphiphilic polymers coupled to a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction to generate dynamic compartments. The results highlight the importance of active interfacial processes in driving compartment formation and provide a route for controlling the dynamic self-assembly of molecules into life-like assemblies.