Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in alkaline medium is currently a point of focus for sustainable development of hydrogen as an alternative clean fuel for various energy systems, but suffers from sluggish reaction kinetics due to additional water dissociation step. So, the state‐of‐the‐art catalysts performing well in acidic media lose considerable catalytic performance in alkaline media. This review summarizes the recent developments to overcome the kinetics issues of alkaline HER, synthesis of materials with modified morphologies, and electronic structures to tune the active sites and their applications as efficient catalysts for HER. It first explains the fundamentals and electrochemistry of HER and then outlines the requirements for an efficient and stable catalyst in alkaline medium. The challenges with alkaline HER and limitation with the electrocatalysts along with prospective solutions are then highlighted. It further describes the synthesis methods of advanced nanostructures based on carbon, noble, and inexpensive metals and their heterogeneous structures. These heterogeneous structures provide some ideal systems for analyzing the role of structure and synergy on alkaline HER catalysis. At the end, it provides the concluding remarks and future perspectives that can be helpful for tuning the catalysts active‐sites with improved electrochemical efficiencies in future.
Post-transition elements, together with zinc-group metals and their alloys belong to an emerging class of materials with fascinating characteristics originating from their simultaneous metallic and liquid natures. These metals and alloys are characterised by having low melting points (i.e. between room temperature and 300 °C), making their liquid state accessible to practical applications in various fields of physical chemistry and synthesis. These materials can offer extraordinary capabilities in the synthesis of new materials, catalysis and can also enable novel applications including microfluidics, flexible electronics and drug delivery. However, surprisingly liquid metals have been somewhat neglected by the wider research community. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals underlying liquid metal research, including liquid metal synthesis, surface functionalisation and liquid metal enabled chemistry. Furthermore, we discuss phenomena that warrant further investigations in relevant fields and outline how liquid metals can contribute to exciting future applications.
Although the Internet of Things (IoT) can increase efficiency and productivity through intelligent and remote management, it also increases the risk of cyber-attacks. The potential threats to IoT applications and the need to reduce risk have recently become an interesting research topic. It is crucial that effective Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) tailored to IoT applications be developed. Such IDSs require an updated and representative IoT dataset for training and evaluation. However, there is a lack of benchmark IoT and IIoT datasets for assessing IDSs-enabled IoT systems. This paper addresses this issue and proposes a new data-driven IoT/IIoT dataset with the ground truth that incorporates a label feature indicating normal and attack classes, as well as a type feature indicating the sub-classes of attacks targeting IoT/IIoT applications for multi-classification problems. The proposed dataset, which is named TON_IoT, includes Telemetry data of IoT/IIoT services, as well as Operating Systems logs and Network traffic of IoT network, collected from a realistic representation of a medium-scale network at the Cyber Range and IoT Labs at the UNSW Canberra (Australia). This paper also describes the proposed dataset of the Telemetry data of IoT/IIoT services and their characteristics. TON_IoT has various advantages that are currently lacking in the state-of-the-art datasets: i) it has various normal and attack events for different IoT/IIoT services, and ii) it includes heterogeneous data sources. We evaluated the performance of several popular Machine Learning (ML) methods and a Deep Learning model in both binary and multi-class classification problems for intrusion detection purposes using the proposed Telemetry dataset.