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Posted on 08/08/2009 10:39:58 PM PDT by Swordmaker
WASHINGTON -- Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.
That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It is creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.
"It is the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim, a physicist at the University of Manchester, England, wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
"A few grams could cover a football field," Rod Ruoff, a graphene researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, said by e-mail. A gram is about one-thirtieth of an ounce.
Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it's as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.timesdispatch.com ...
Are you kidding me? I read _A LOT_. I personally own somewhere north of 10,000 books, mostly science fiction. Wife and I worked for publishers for many years, it's easy to collect books.
Anyway, of all the books I've read, I can count on 4 fingers the books I've never finshed. I first couldn't get through Red Mars when it came out at some point in the 90s. About 5 years ago I decided I would muscle through it. I got through Red, Blue and halfway into Green and gave up. There were two fun parts in that melodramatic, communist Utopian dreck. When the elevator fell and the cable wrapped around the planet and when Phobos was de-orbited.
The most frustrating part was that he'd introduce someone, you get to know them for 150 pages then without explaining anything, they're just gone. Just jump to new characters doing nothing of consequence until..poof, new characters again. It is like a stream of conscience missive that starts nowhere and ends nowhere. Pure garbage.
i agree a tough read,but i really enjoyed the creative solutions to making Mars habitable.
I only own some 500 books now,also mostly sci fi but due to space limitations i can say i’ve given away at least 5 times that number. i still own Pebble in the sky purchased at the P.S. 42 book fair when i was in 3rd grade some 46-7 years ago.
Just for the hell of it,i read close to 100 books a year which is ALOT and considering my age that works out to some 4000 in my life since i was not reading as much or as fast as a youngster. I’m impressed by the size of your library but find it difficult to fathom how you’ll ever have time to read them all.
Out in Ohio, land of the carbon emitting smoke stacks, engineers are hard at work on the dis gronifacator that attaches behind the burners and before the scrubbers to soak up C02 and shunt it into the gronifacators that transform the compound into graphene powder and Oxygen. The graphine is extruded as a thin ribbon that is then rolled into sheets. The Oxygen is forced into the burners and intensifies the combustion temperatures.
I doubt I've read anywhere near all of them yet, maybe half and it still grows every time we go to Borders. Wife reads more than I do since she's not working. I also started many years ago so it adds up over time. Also consider that many of them are serials and things that can be read in a few hours. I mean, it's not like I've read with a length like Dan Simmons. Currently working on Robin Hobbs books...each one is 800+ and it takes a while.
My point was that I can read pretty much anything. KSR books seem to me to be a worst of the worst. Asimov(pebble, great!) on the other hand is the exact opposite. As is Heinlein. I've read everything both of those masters have written.
Astroturf would be a better choice. :P
As I understand it . . . one or more materials from Roswell were a complex sheet of 5-8 or so different basic substances . . . EACH interlayered in complex ways about 1 atom thick per substance.
Some folks assert that the “laws of physics” as stated in the text books have been deliberately deceptive for decades.
Thanks for the ping.
And you for your kind reply.
Have a blessed Sunday.
Thank you - you have a blessed Sunday too.
He and the old fed chairman guy could have been twins, verbally speaking.
I wonder if cleats would penetrate it? If not, and it's as slippery as graphite, I can picture the players being unable to even walk, much less run... no friction!
I'm afraid of depths. (Hey, it's the natural progression!)
The reported/purported foil that went back flat after being crumpled may have been analyzed, but obviously there’d be no published papers on it (too bad, really). Material one atom thick wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. Graphene is the strongest material currently known. Sez here it’s a Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (that makes no sense, there’s no Hydrogen involved) which would make it carcinogenic. Probably will lead to something useful, like really good sunglasses, or maybe nanolasers. ;’) Hey, I’m probably dead wrong, so nobody write in, okay? ;’)
Thanks Quix!
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/graphene/index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene
“These guys claim to be making the stuff in a single continuous sheet (one giant molecule).”
If they drop it how would they every find it?
I wonder if a sufficiently-large sheet of graphene could be folded in half more than nine times.
THANKS for your links and kind words and posts.
LOL.
Love the cat one.
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