Always new ideas to bubble up….Graphene*

I came across this post about a new use for carbon fiber— really awesome use of a common material.  I love that it starts as simply as carbon from a pencil collected on scotch tape, and leads to a very simple manufacturing process of coating plastic with carbon, setting it up with a laser, and using it as a capacitor to distribute energy.  Just amazing!

In 2004, physicists at theUniversity of Manchester and the Institute for Microelectronics Technology, Chernogolovka, Russia, first isolated individual graphene planes by using adhesive tape.^[14] They also measured electronic properties of the obtained flakes and showed their unique properties.^[15] In 2005 the same Manchester Geim group together with the Philip Kim group from Columbia University (see the History section) demonstrated that quasiparticles in graphene were massless Dirac fermions. These discoveries led to an explosion of interest in graphene.  [Wikipedia]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

Watch this little film…I promise you will be amazed too!

http://memolition.com/2013/02/20/the-super-supercapacitor/

Once on a CD presentation, I heard some futurists talking about — the future.  One in particular impressed me with his comment, that as creative beings, we will always invent and aspire our way out of problems.  It’s just in our nature!  This seems to be true of these guys working with carbon fiber.  They won the Nobel Prize for it too.  Whooo-hoo!

Related articles

• Hero material: 10 fascinating facts about graphene (conversations.nokia.com)
• University of Manchester spins off 2-DTech to sell advanced 2D materials (graphenetracker.com)
• Commercializing graphene – assumptions and realities (nanowerk.com)
• EU to spend €1 billion on graphene R&D (information-age.com)
• VIDEO: Surge in interest in Graphene (bbc.co.uk)
• New study gives insight into graphene grain boundaries (phys.org)
• Patent surge reveals graphene race (bbc.co.uk)
• First look at world-leading graphene Institute (nanowerk.com)
• Is graphene really a wonder-material? (bbc.co.uk)