Epigenetic changes associated with the progression of prion disease in Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus).

Two-dimensional (2D) materials span a remarkable range of electronic properties, with graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) representing the extremes of electrical conductivity and insulating behavior, respectively. Between these extremes, ternary boron-carbon-nitride (BCN) alloys bridge this gap by adjusting their composition. BCN can be tuned into semiconducting regimes while retaining high thermal stability and oxidation resistance. In ultrathin nanosheet form, BCN has attracted interest for supercapacitors, lithium-ion batteries, and electrocatalytic systems, where a combination of redox-active sites and composition-controlled band gaps can be tuned to enhance device performance. Despite this potential, synthesizing high-quality BCN remains chemically and structurally challenging. Thermodynamically, the system favors B–N and C–C bonds over B–C and C–N bonds; so, prolonged high-temperature treatments and slow cooling naturally drive phase segregation into graphene-like carbon regions and h-BN-rich domains, rather than a homogeneous atomic alloy. Furthermore, canonical layered materials also tend to relax into thermodynamically favored stacking sequences (such as AA’ or AB), governed by interlayer van der Waals interactions, making it challenging to access turbostratic structures with rotational misalignment and enlarged interlayer spacing. Turbostratic BCN (tBCN) is particularly attractive because the lack of vertical alignment decouples neighboring layers, preserving the intrinsic band structure of individual sheets and facilitating exfoliation. However, BCN-based electrodes fabricated by conventional hydrothermal, chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and laser-scribing routes typically exhibit areal capacitances in the range of 40–180 mF cm, limited by small interlayer spacing and low active-site densities arising from equilibrium stacking. Even state-of-the-art multi-step composites, such as 3D BCN/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) broccoli structures and BCN nanotubes on carbon fibers, reach only 179 mF cm and 177.1 mF cm, respectively. Achieving competitive electrochemical performance from a single-step, green synthesis route, therefore, remains an important open challenge. Traditional synthesis strategies like CVD and static furnace pyrolysis demand high temperatures, long reaction times (hours to days), slow cooling, and often expensive substrates. Solvothermal methods, meanwhile, rely on hazardous solvents, large volumes, and complex multistep purification. The detailed experimental conditions, precursor choices, and specific limitations of these methods are summarized in . Under these near-equilibrium conditions, cooling rates are usually below ∼10 K/s, and the activation barriers for layer rearrangement can be easily overcome; so, the lattice relaxes into ordered, low-energy stacking modes, and the metastable turbostratic phase is not preserved. Although some low-temperature CVD approaches using single-source precursors suppress gross phase segregation, producing bulk quantities of highly crystalline tBCN remains challenging because this phase is intrinsically metastable and tends to revert to more ordered configurations unless its formation is kinetically trapped.