Dear Mitch,

If you post this, please leave my name off of it.    (Request accepted)

You asked for a physicist to comment on the TiO2 catalyst.  I'm a chemist.  We normally deal with that sort of thing more than most  physicists.

The person who sent you the note gave you a half truth.  The catalyst IS likely to split water.  The ability of titania, to do such things has been know for over a decade.  It occurs when other metal centers are present.  There are probably over a hundred, and possibly several hundred papers addressing this in the scientific literature.  The papers would have been published in numerous publicly available journals, such as "The Journal of the American Chemical Society," and "The Journal of the Electrochemical Society."  These are two of many journals that would have had papers on the subject.

In fact, if you recall, a couple of years ago there was some publicity about self cleaning windows.  These are windows with a layer of titania (possibly discontinuous, I don't recall).  So there's the half truth -- the catalyst is likely to be able to split water.

The untruthful aspect is in the cover-up claim.  Although most of the journal articles are tough for the average person to read, they are out there freely available to the public.  To get to them, you have to go to a university library that carries these journals (frequently the chemistry departments have separate libraries).

If the person who did the research submits the work to a journal, it WILL be peer reviewed.  This is done to minimize the amount of bogus work in the scientific literature (some bad stuff still gets through).  It's conceivable that a paper concerning this catalyst was submitted and turned down because of flaws in the work (I haven't seen the paper, so I don't know).  So, maybe in that form it won't see the light of day.  But if they did the experiments that the reviewers asked for, or improved the manuscript to satisfy the reviewers (some stuff, when submitted, is pretty shabby), then the paper would get published.  IF it's decent work.

Another problem people run into is that they will submit to the wrong journal.  Journals like "Science"  or "Nature" only publish brief communications of cutting edge work with implications over a broad ares of science.  The titania stuff is no longer that big of a deal.  Publications like "The Journal of the American Chemical Society" contain papers that are much more detailed but more specifically relevant to chemistry.  For the titania work, because it's been around a while, other, less prestigious but
still good journals might be more appropriate.

I know this is a long answer, but I don't want to see you mislead.  The titania work has been around for a long time (so long that I now no longer collect papers on the subject).  It hasn't been covered up.  That particular catalyst composition looks like many others that are out there.  It may be different in exact composition, but it's just part of a well understood class of materials.  The person who sent it in to you may be exaggerating or may not understand what happens in science.