Beginning of a Graphene Revolution?

Sounds like the beginning of a marketing hype revolution.

It may be hype now, but look out. It is being developed to satisfy many applications.

It scares boggles the mind of old guys like me to think of the startling advancement that materials sciences has made in the last 5 years.

Indeed it does boggle the mind to think of all the possible applications for this substance(and others), and what those changes will mean, how it will transform the realities we deal with everyday....Fundamental changes in design and construction, production, even waste reclamation and recycling....It's a bold new world that needs men and women of vision and dedication with the discipline and knowledge to carry through this historic paradigm shift to greater efficiency and to ride this wave of cultural shock that will accompany such leaps as we are experiencing at this time...and to this end I raise my glass in salute' to the champions of the future,,,,passes out

So you havent build a Graphene Bow yet?

totally cool stuff thats only going to get better as its applications grow from the lab to commercial usages

Many years ago, my engineering mentor stated that there has not been many new ideas in mechanics. The technological revolution has been in the developeint of materials

But can you actually make wire from it? How about making a boiler from graphene? For that matter why make a wire from it, or a boiler? What if you don't need wires or boilers any more? Can you use graphene to generate electricity?

Since graphene is transparent, could it be used to focus sunlight upon to nano-boil a suspension of carbon black (or gold nano particles) in water to produce 15 psig steam without raising the temperature of the water more than a whisker? Or could you layer several sheets of graphene to make a colored filter? A polarizing filter? How about a color filter than has electric current dependency (for HUD, image projection, etc.) or can you make little tiny magnets to switch on and off to cause localized color changes?

"Many proposed applications of graphene require the ability to tune its electronic structure at the nanoscale^{1, 2}. Although charge transfer³ and field-effect doping⁴ can be applied to manipulate charge carrier concentrations, using them to achieve nanoscale control remains a challenge. An alternative approach is 'self-doping'⁵, in which extended defects are introduced into the graphene lattice. The controlled engineering of these defects represents a viable approach to creation and nanoscale control of one-dimensional charge distributions with widths of several atoms⁶. However, the only experimentally realized extended defects so far have been the edges of graphene nanoribbons^{7, 8, 9,10}, which show dangling bonds that make them chemically unstable^{11, 12, 13}. Here, we report the realization of a one-dimensional topological defect in graphene, containing octagonal and pentagonal sp²-hybridized carbon rings embedded in a perfect graphene sheet. By doping the surrounding graphene lattice, the defect acts as a quasi-one-dimensional metallic wire. Such wires may form building blocks for atomic-scale, all-carbon electronics."

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v5/n5/full/nnano.2010.53.html

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/university-of-south-florida-create-tiny.html

In the movie The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was advised to invest in "plastic". It seems graphene may be the new plastic in which to invest.

Wow,,,,are those graphene? Mrs Robinson?

300 times harder than steel!!!

Could they even measure that? How many times harder than diamond?

If you want 'hard' you should see my brother...
He's so hard he eats broken glass for breakfast cereal.
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With no sugar
Del

Graphene is most definitely a boon to the research establishment. Enough said. Until I see something made from I can shape, bend, or fasten to an engine, I don't think I will be very excited.

I kid you not, I saw this football player in Kermit, Texas eat a light bulb one time, and I could hear it crunching. We actually had to play against this fellow.

Ok the article said "stronger" not harder. But it would be measured with the designation " after a number.