Graphene Progress report till now.

You probably heard buzz about graphene made big waves back in 2004 and it's knocked around science news ever sent a global race for graphene, You know it's not just limited to one little thing that seems to range, it's going to grab some of the credit for you think three to a lot of mind blowing technology but that was almost fifteen years ago where all of the graphene wonders that we were promised the bulletproof armor the graphing circuitry the ultra light airplanes the graphene medicine in space elevator so the next time a man walks on the moon maybe he'll take the elevator to get there clearly lots of the buzz never went anywhere but graphing does exist engineers have gone from making one flick at a time to producing it by the barrelful they want to try to pick it up.

So the graphing revolution we were promised may already be in motion.

You can stretch and pull and in fact a good way to visualize it is that if you had a big sheet of pure graphene you could hold a soccer ball and just one atomic layer and that's been seen Joseph Meany is an analytical chemist who coauthored a book about the promise of graphene he explained to us that graphene is just carbon like coal or graphite were diamond The difference is in how the carbon atoms are bonded together and in the unique shape of the material takes so it's just the single atom she has no Z. dimension to speak of in graphene and these atoms of carbon are arranged in interlocking or carefully that have. Kind of like a chicken wire and be the bonds between the carbon atoms are actually stream only strong back in two thousand and four researchers in the U.K. discovered that they could produce graphene with some shockingly simple tools a hunk of a particular type of graphite and some standard issue tape it was just a very large home to the good hold in your hand and they took the tape in put it down to the surface of the graphite and lifted it off from there they used chemicals to dissolve away the tape and they were left with tiny flakes of graphene with remarkable properties it's impossibly light get incredibly strong it's flexible and it's a highly efficient conductor of electricity the researchers won a Nobel Prize in two thousand and ten and today in two thousand and eighteen literally everything around us is built on hands with gravity.

OK, not quite.

It's very easy for the media to seize on any new scientific or technological development as some think there's going to be transformative — you know scientists come up with these amazing new materials and then everything changes, and of course it never really happens that way Philip Ball is a reporter who's written a bunch about the graphing. The machine and I asked him to throw some cold water on the story.

It is fillable. I hate doing this Couric on the verge of Garri.

Of course, with any new technology.

The reality is that it can really take years to develop and it will be unreasonable to expect Graffy to transform our lives save at night the uphill battle for any new material is that it can't just be better than existing technology it has to be much better Philip says that's the issue with graphene replacing silicon electronics so I mean there are companies who are exploring if you have a conductive electronic material but of course we already have such materials and graphene has really got to have good bondage It is a war we have already if it's going to displace what is already a well established mature technology. But that's not to say that graphene hasn't gone anywhere in fifteen years we found some engineers who are making materials of graphing today materials that could one day even end up in spaceships the company is very big materials and their president John letter showed me how far they've come with graphene mass production and he gave us a free sample literally just like floating in the file and so if you open that.

You can take this is a bag of about one point five kilograms of graphene that fits in a thirty gallon container so it's a very light sort of luminous. And it sort of wall across state more back is introducing its manufactured graphene powder to all sorts of industrial and consumer products like R F I D tags clothing and even rubber so you take the graphene you blended into into rubber an eruv or they use sort of big blunders almost that beat the rubber around mix the graphene into it and what you get by mixing the graphene with the rubber is very high temperature capabilities and also very high strength thinking about an application for this you talk about space ships right like you're going through extremely high temperature to extremely cold temperature in outer space you don't want rubber that would expand and contract and loses its strength over time exactly this material won't do that that's exactly right and on the electronics front because created graphene based thinks that can be printed in mass on standard printing presses when printed on waterproof fabrics that can be washed heated ironed wrinkled and twisted without damaging the circuits this is extremely promising for the future of graphene based wearable electronics which John says we should be on the lookout for in twenty minutes what we really hope is that you know we can walk into a room five years from now and most people in that room will have an article of clothing that has graphing wearable products and so there are big things happening with graphene but we just have to be patient and we can't believe everything we read about. And for what it's worth we've been here before, it's just the sort of standing notion of a wonder material I think, it does go back to the door of the plastic age and the1930's you know you still have the same kinds of promises made for them that they were going to be these you know one bite arrows that would do everything I say they want to do.

Just one likes.

The plastic you know they can ANY had he would get back to have they do all kinds of useful things they have their limitations, too I guess it was really a sort of reference to this sort of longstanding idea of all that material. You know going to solve every problem graphene might not be a wonder material any more than plastic is but the way John sees it is grafting works well on its own merits the hype won't matter at all we really don't want our customers to care whether it's graphene or not what we want them to know is that this thing this device that you're using works better for longer than anything else you can get and whether has graphene in it whether they advertise it in use that hype is part of the marketing or not is sort of completely irrelevant it just is better.