21st Century Innovative Technologies and Developments as also discoveries, curiosity ( insolite)...

The word “super-material” gets thrown around a lot these days — ceramic super-materials, aerogel super materials, elastomeric super materials. But one super-material overshadows them all, earning its discoverers a Nobel Prize and defining the upper limit for scientific hype and excitement. It has the potential to revolutionize processing, power storage, even space exploration… but it has yet to actually achieve much of anything. It’s called graphene, and it’s the granddaddy of the modern boom in materials science. Graphene has the potential to be one of the most disruptive single inventions of all time — but what is it, really?

Scientists have been talking about graphene for the better part of a hundred years, though not always by that name. The idea was easy enough to come up with: what if we could take a diamond and slice it into wafers just one atom thick? This would make it a so-called “two-dimensional” substance, made entirely out of carbon, yet flexible in a way that diamond cannot be. It not only has the incredible physical properties you’d expect from a sheet of crystal, widely cited as the strongest material ever created on a per-weight basis, but it also has incredibly high electrical conductivity. Being atomically small, graphene could allow much, much more tight packing of transistors in a processor, for instance, and allow many electronics industries to take huge steps forward.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Graphene