The field of thermoelectrics has long been recognized as a potentially transformative power generation technology and the field is now growing steadily due to their ability to convert heat directly into electricity and to develop cost-effective, pollution-free forms of energy conversion. Of various types of thermoelectric materials, nanostructured materials have shown the most promise for commercial use because of their extraordinary thermoelectric performances. This article aims to summarize the present progress of nanostructured thermoelectrics and intends to understand and explain the underpinnings of the innovative breakthroughs in the last decade or so. We believed that recent achievements will augur the possibility for thermoelectric power generation and cooling, and discuss several future directions which could lead to new exciting next generation of nanostructured thermoelectrics

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) represents a very powerful tool for the identification of molecular species, but unfortunately it has been essentially restricted to noble metal supports (Au, Ag and Cu). While the application of semiconductor materials as SERS substrate would enormously widen the range of uses for this technique, the detection sensitivity has been much inferior and the achievable SERS enhancement was rather limited, thereby greatly limiting the practical applications. Here we report the employment of non-stoichiometric tungsten oxide nanostructure, sea urchin-like W₁₈O₄₉ nanowire, as the substrate material, to magnify the substrate–analyte molecule interaction, leading to significant magnifications in Raman spectroscopic signature. The enrichment of surface oxygen vacancy could bring additional enhancements. The detection limit concentration was as low as 10⁻⁷ M and the maximum enhancement factor was 3.4 × 10⁵, in the rank of the highest sensitivity, to our best knowledge, among semiconducting materials, even comparable to noble metals without ‘hot spots’.