Graphene

[TriPolar]

@Senegoid

Indeed! One of the remarks in that article mentioned that a little cube of the stuff weighs 1/7 as much as air and can balance on the tip of a blade of grass.

Huh? If it weighs 1/7 as much as air, they’d have to tie it down to keep it there.

This is the stuff of which airships are made! We’ll all have our own personal flying airships!

ETA: The Graphene Zeppelin.

For some reason stuff like graphene which is mostly empty space between a matrix of carbon atoms is weighed as if it were in a vacuum, then density is calculated based on the total volume occupied including all the empty space. So a cardboard box 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot is considered to occupy one cubic foot even though folded up it might only occupy 1/10 of a cubic foot. I understand the need for such measurements but using that as the standard description of density ends up sounding nonsensical in the wrong context.

[Ethilrist]

@Ethilrist

From what I’ve seen, although people keep coming up with progressively better methods to create the stuff, we don’t yet have a way to make enough of it, or big enough pieces of it, to do full-on production of something that capitalizes on its abilities. So, even though we’ve been able to do small-scale tests of what it can do, we can’t make a cell phone battery that will charge from empty to full in 10 seconds, or a programmable-color skin for a car, or a camouflage cloak that makes you pretty darn invisible, for anything remotely resembling an affordable price.

Development of a truly phenomenal use for the stuff may spur research into larger-scale, cheaper production methods, but until then, it’s on the level of stem cell research, or that girl who figured out how to use piezoelectric crystals to make a flashlight that’s powered with your own body heat: Amazing, phenomenal results, but there’s not too much we can do with it from a practical standpoint.

um… never mind.

[Chronos]

How much is “industrial quantities”? I don’t doubt that they can make amounts that are practical for some applications. But which applications are those, and how much is enough for them?

[j_sum1]

In today’s news

Graphene 'wonder material' made with kitchen blender

Apparently you can make graphene in your own kitchen. (But it is not advisable.)
Applications range from cleaning oil spills to making thinner condoms. (Nice to know that it is going to be used for something useful.)
Square metre sized sheets of graphene have been produced but they are no good since they have too many defects.
With a modification of this process they hope to produce a kilogram per day. I guess that is what is meant by industrial quantities.

[smithsb]

Yes, but with an infinite number of monkeys and kitchen blenders - think of the possibilities - Shakespeare’s entire works printed on Graphene Zeppelins.

[Senegoid]

Graphene is just the more scientific chemical name for upsidaisium, which can be obtained in industrial quantities from upsidaisium mines.