With the massive consumption of fossil fuels and its detrimental impact on the environment, methods of generating clean power are urgent. Hydrogen is an ideal carrier for renewable energy; however, hydrogen generation is inefficient because of the lack of robust catalysts that are substantially cheaper than platinum. Therefore, robust and durable earth-abundant and cost-effective catalysts are desirable for hydrogen generation from water splitting via hydrogen evolution reaction. Here we report an active and durable earth-abundant transition metal dichalcogenide-based hybrid catalyst that exhibits high hydrogen evolution activity approaching the state-of-the-art platinum catalysts, and superior to those of most transition metal dichalcogenides (molybdenum sulfide, cobalt diselenide and so on). Our material is fabricated by growing ternary molybdenum sulfoselenide particles on self-standing porous nickel diselenide foam. This advance provides a different pathway to design cheap, efficient and sizable hydrogen-evolving electrode by simultaneously tuning the number of catalytic edge sites, porosity, heteroatom doping and electrical conductivity.

Discovery of thermoelectric materials has long been realized by the Edisonian trial and error approach. However, recent progress in theoretical calculations, including the ability to predict structures of unknown phases along with their thermodynamic stability and functional properties, has enabled the so-called inverse design approach. Compared to the traditional materials discovery, the inverse design approach has the potential to substantially reduce the experimental efforts needed to identify promising compounds with target functionalities. By adopting this approach, here we have discovered several unreported half-Heusler compounds. Among them, the p-type TaFeSb-based half-Heusler demonstrates a record high ZT of ~1.52 at 973 K. Additionally, an ultrahigh average ZT of ~0.93 between 300 and 973 K is achieved. Such an extraordinary thermoelectric performance is further verified by the heat-to-electricity conversion efficiency measurement and a high efficiency of ~11.4% is obtained. Our work demonstrates that the TaFeSb-based half-Heuslers are highly promising for thermoelectric power generation.