Bird droppings to help cut the crap in graphene doping papers

An image showing a group of chicken and poo

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Dramatic illustration shows there’s little value in doping graphene electrodes to make better water splitting catalysts

‘It seems that whatever “crap” we put into graphene, electrocatalysis increases.’ That’s according to Martin Pumera, University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague, Czech Republic, and colleagues, whose experiments prove their point.1 Pumera’s team has added bird droppings to graphene electrodes, improving their efficiency of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen electrochemically by 50%(?).