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Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible To Use
An anonymous reader writes: We keep hearing about the revolutionary properties of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon whose physical characteristics hold a great deal of promise — if we can figure out good ways to produce it and use it. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of graphene and its discoverer, Andre Geim, as well as one of the physicists leading a big chunk of the bleeding-edge graphene research, James Tour.
Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."
Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."
we weren't already doing so many things we were once told were impossible.
how about making it a few more atoms thick so it can be used as a condom?
it's just an engineering challenge. in the late 19th century, people would have scoffed at the idea of an electrical device with over 4 billion components in a few square centimeters that was mass produced.
Or imagine the most esteemed scientist of that day being told that a 200 meter long submarine vessel with a crew of 150 could be made with a power plant that only needed refueling every fifteen years, and that it could go for months underwater without surfacing, with weapons sufficient to destroy dozens of large cities.
Ah, yes, the New Yorker - when i need someone to cut through the latest scientific controversies, there is no finer swordsman.
Every time a new discovery is made, legions of naysayers appear to tell us how it will not make a difference or is impossible to implement or too expensive or, well, you fill in the blank. Never underestimate the ingenuity of people wanting fame, wealth, professional success, better mate selection or whatever. Graphene will be whatever it will be. It was only a relatively few years ago that these same people, or their ilk, thought they knew everything there was to know about the well-explored element, carbon. The future will reveal itself in due course and those who predict utopia or disaster are both likely to be wrong.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
And in the 50s we were going to be driving nuclear powered cars by now.
And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Did you read the article? In it they talk about a process to make graphene from anthracite coal with a 25% yield rate. The problem is not making graphene, any idiot with a pencil can do that, it's making large sheets of graphene. They go over this more than once. You really didn't read the article, did you?
That class proved to me that I was not, in fact, a chemical engineer.
If so, taking it wasn't a mistake because it kept you from spending years learning something you weren't really cut out for. And, if you count in the tuition money you saved, it may have been the best thing you ever did while at Rice.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
It won't make condoms better.
The first problem with condoms is they block the feeling of moisture. The second is they block the movement of the foreskin. Of course, for men who are circumcised and so who already lost most of their ability to feel what sex is (because of thicker and less sensitive skin as well as no foreskin movement), it doesn't matter much, but even then there's the third problem of the pause between foreplay and penetration which change sex from an act of pure passion to something, let's say, less spontaneous.
All of those problems won't be solve with thinner condoms.