Graphene

Prediction: we're going to hear a lot about Graphene in the years to come.

This is a very new material (not even in my spell checker dictionary yet), created by forming carbon into a one-atom-thick honeycomb membrane. Scientists Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering it.

Most people have never heard of it, but it's going to be huge. And that's because Graphene has some amazing properties not found in any other material:

It's 100 times stronger than steel.

It conducts electricity as good as copper.

It is so thin it's transparent.

It conducts heat better than any material known to science.

It blocks the passage of all gasses but allows water vapor to pass through easily. This is not a small thing. Helium gas can leak through glass, but graphene stops it, while letting the much larger water vapor molecules through. This is very strange behavior for a material.

Graphene is called a 2-dimensional material, because it is one atom thick - basically as thin as anything you can make. When you roll it up it creates a 1-dimensional Nanotube.

The picture above is an electron microscope image of multiple layers of graphene lying atop each other like bed sheets.

You can just imagine the usefulness of a product like this. The semiconductor industry has big plans to use graphene in CPU and GPU units...it's a game changer, allowing the creation of transistors that are far smaller and far faster than anything yet constructed. You can create heat sinks. You can filter contaminants, or even distill alcohol with it. You can use it to support samples for electron microscope viewing because it is so thin and so strong and so clear. And Graphene is so resistant to so many materials, you can use it as a protective coating.

Development of these applications will take a few years, but they are surely coming.

And here's something very interesting...while Graphene was formally discovered in 2004 and is very difficult to manufacture perfectly, it is highly likely that you create it every time you use a graphite pencil. Some of the graphite flakes shed from pencils turn out to be single-atom-thick graphene sheets.