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.
Researchers from the Pierre Aigrain Laboratory in the ENS Physics department in Paris, France, have discovered a new cooling mechanism for electronic components made of graphene deposited on boron nitride. The efficiency of this mechanism reportedly allowed the team to reach electric intensities at the intrinsic limit of the laws of conduction.
Researchers from Cornell have developed tiny graphene-enhanced robot exoskeletons that can rapidly change shape upon sensing chemical or thermal changes in its environment. And, they claim, these microscale machines – equipped with electronic, photonic and chemical payloads – could become a powerful platform for robotics at the size scale of biological microorganisms.
“We are trying to build what you might call an ‘exoskeleton’ for electronics,” said the team. “Right now, you can make little computer chips that do a lot of information-processing … but they don’t know how to move or cause something to bend”.
Following Dotz Nano’s MoU with Colorplastic to develop GQDs-enhanced polymers and surface modificants in October 2017, the Company announced its first major purchasing agreement for the sale of GQDs with Colorplastic.
According to the said agreement, Colorplastic agreed to purchase $300,000 USD of GQDs per annum. The price per kg is not disclosed in order to protect Dotz Nano’s pricing policy. Colorplastic’s purchase of GQDs is conditional on it receiving specific purchase orders for GQD enhanced polymers and plastics from its customers.
Chinese footwear producers are reportedly focusing on graphene-enhanced shoes that are lightweight, self-sterilizing and deodorizing. In Jinjiang City, Fujian, China’s largest production center for sports shoes, footware makers are adding graphene powder to soles, according to Xu Zhi of the Graphene Industry and Technology Research Institute in Jinjiang.
Metal corrosion is an important and often costly problem in many branches of industry. Standard anticorrosion coatings need to be relatively thick. Graphene, in contrast, could prevent oxygen and water from reaching a metal surface with only a negligible coating thickness. However, it is semi-metallic and could even accelerate electrochemical corrosion by forming a circuit with the metal. These two contradictory properties need to be better understood to develop useful graphene coatings for metals.
Revealing a new production process, scientists at UCLA have used light and heat to synthesize graphene nanoribbons. In their search for a material with great semiconductivity at ambient temperature, scientists have known for many years that carbon nanotubes have a large ballistic conductivity capability, that is to say with negligible electric resistivity.
The physical foundation for invention is materials. New innovations in materials enable the development of new products never thought possible. Graphene is the material that will make many 21st century tech, medical and industrial innovations possible. Graphene is a newly discovered carbon-based material that has unique properties at the atomic level. The physical science behind it would take a while to describe but the possibilities for advancing technology are great. Because of the atomic structure and strength of this material, it is a better conductor than copper, currently used in semiconductors. In fact, at only one atom in depth, graphene is the fastest, smallest, strongest and lightest material yet discovered.