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 ...
Airplane skins, as well.
You guys are soooo two dimensional...
Didn't think of that. What would the drag be - virtually nil? As well as being able to "cut" into the air with the leading edge with virtually no drag at all, too.
“I wonder if a sufficiently-large sheet of graphene could be folded in half more than nine times.”
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You earned an immediate belly-laugh from me for that one!
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