Came across this article. First of all, it has the best title of a scholarly paper ever.
But the real beauty is that the use of the word “crap” is not just a rhetorical flourish. If I’m reading the introduction correctly, there have been numerous studies published showing that doping graphene with pretty well anything increases its electrocatalytic performance. The authors therefore doped graphene with bird shit in order to make a point that further studies “do not bring significant insight”.
Read the introduction. It is a masterpiece of scholarly exasperation:
“It has become almost a paradigm that the once fantastic graphene for electrocatalysis is not so fantastic anymore and that we need to add something to it (i.e., a dopant) to make it great again.”
“It seems that whatever “crap” we put into graphene, electrocatalysis increases. One may exaggerate only a little by saying that if we spit on graphene it becomes a better electrocatalyst.”
“Having 84 reasonably stable elements (apart from noble gases and carbon), one can produce 84 articles on monoelemental doping of graphene; with two dopants we have 3486 possible combinations, with three dopants we can publish 95,284 combinations, and with four elements there are close to 2 × 10^6 combinations.”
“To make our point of the meaninglessness of efforts to co-dope graphene with various elements experimentally, we evaluate in this work if guano-doped graphene poses any advantages over nonguano-doped graphene.”
Simply beautiful.