> This second shield helps protect the steel in chloride containing environments up to an ultra high potential of 1700 mV.

Uh, dumb question, how is 1.7 volts "ultra high potential" ? Is that even enough to do electrolysis like they're talking about?

> That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it.

> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.

This is the Cannot be explained bit

this kind of headline is bad for our collective souls; I know raging against the clickbait is old hat but seriously, this is ridiculous. Materials science is surely interesting enough to a reader of science direct without being SHOCKED and APPALLED all the time

So apart from the clickbait, the reason why this is interesting is because it's a limiter for the often cited idea of clean green hydrogen from electrolyis. The current use of titanium and precious metals is, obviously, really expensive, so it's uneconomical to build something that only runs on "spare" electricity.

@dang maybe we could have the title changed to something like

"Hong Kong researchers develop corrosion-resistant steel for seawater hydrogen electrolysis"

You just know that engineers and management in Toyota's delusional hydrogen division are salivating.