The Future of Everything is a topic from a UK newspaper. They asked “Graphene the ‘miracle material’ is stronger than diamond but what can it do?”
“Some of the most interesting developments to reach the marketplace have come in medicine and the military:
- Researchers showed that a graphene bulletproof vest 0.1mm thick had twice the stopping power of a Kevlar vest or 10 times better than a steel plate
- Graphene has been used to re-fuse a spine back together after being severed
- Batteries with a full charge time of five seconds because of graphene’s conductivity have been demonstrated
- Flexible brain implants have been shown to be possible
- A sieve capable of turning seawater into drinking water has been invented
- Graphene has been used in concrete production to make it stronger and more environmentally friendly
- A transistor has been theorised that, if made, would make computers 1,000 times quicker and require 1% of the energy to run. It would move your 3GHz laptop to a 3,000Ghz machine
- The world’s thinnest lightbulb (one atom thick) has been created
What we’re on the ‘cusp’ of remains to be seen but there are many projects being worked on:
- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $100,000 for research into redesigning the condom using materials like graphene
- It is said to be able to improve the pace of DNA sequencing
- The experiments with concrete discussed above could by itself cut global CO2 emissions by up to 5% (concrete production is estimated to account for 8% of total emissions
- Airbus is experimenting with making plane parts using graphene
- Your Kindle reader might be about to become paper-thin and made with graphene.
The various lists do make it sound like graphene could be the future of everything but what do you think?
Read full article at Graphene the ‘miracle material’ is stronger than diamond but what can it do?
Source: Metro UK, Alex Hudson
Stronger than diamond, graphene could change everything from how buildings are made to how computers work (Illustration: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk). Illustration inspired by this description. It was a material so strong that it would ‘take an elephant, balanced on a sharpened pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap [cling film].’
Read more graphene news over here.
