Graphene was meant to transform everything from the car tyre to the condom. There has never been so much hype around a new material. It’s easy to see why: its sheets of carbon atoms are incredibly strong, super-elastic and conduct heat better than most metals. The problem with graphene, however, is that it has yet to live up to its expectations commercially.
For centuries, metals were employed in optical applications only as mirrors and gratings. New vistas opened up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering and the use of surface plasmon (collective electronic oscillations at the surface of metals) resonances for sensing. However, it was not until the 1990s, with the appearance of accurate and reliable nanofabrication techniques, that plasmonics blossomed.
Back in 2004, two Russian scientists at the UK’s University of Manchester managed to produce the world’s first two-dimensional material by isolating a single layer of graphite atoms, something researchers had been attempting to achieve since the 70s, which eventually earned the Manchester-based team a Nobel prize in 2010. While numerous developments, such as carbon nanotubes, have arisen from the original research, useful and genuinely disruptive graphene-based innovations have so far been elusive due to the exorbitant cost of producing the material.
An electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing machine the size of a human cell? Is that even possible? Cornell University physicists Paul McEuen and Itai Cohen not only say yes, but they’ve actually built the “muscle” for one.
The Fisker Emotion electric car will make its public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week – and a new picture has shown the car that’ll be displayed. Due to arrive in the UK in 2020, offering a 400-mile-plus range from its electric powertrain, the Emotion is claimed to feature “state of the art” graphene solid-state batteries that can receive 125 miles of charge in as little as nine minutes.
Iowa State University researchers have created a new, low-cost, easily produced, graphene-based sensors-on-tape that can be attached to plants to provide data that was previously very hard to collect. This can help farmers to breed plants that are more efficient in using water, for example, but also open new possibilities for creating new sensors for biomedical diagnostics, for checking the structural integrity of buildings, monitoring the environment and, after appropriate modifications, for testing crops for diseases or pesticides.