I’m sure some of you out there have, at one point or another, thought “is the lifestyle we live in the first world sustainable?” The overwhelming scientific consensus is that things need to change if we are going to keep things the way they are now. This is much easier said than done though since we are a society that is heavily dependant on fossil fuels and batteries for energy, and incidentally these are two of the reasons why our environment is changing for the worse.
These problems we are facing opened the door for a potentially world changing discovery. Back in 2010, the nobel prize in physics was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their groundbreaking work with a material called graphene. Since then research into this material has exploded and the potential applications seem boundless.
Graphene by AlexanderAIUS via Wikimedia Commons
Graphene itself is about 100 times stronger than steel; if you were to make a 1 square meter sheet of the material and make it 1000 times thinner than a piece of paper and hang this up like a hammock it would be able to hold up a 10 pound cat, but would weigh less than one of its whiskers. Aside from its possible application of an awesome super light hammock, this material has researchers buzzing about its potential for the technology and energy industries.
Graphene also has the ability to act as a super capacitor, which means that it is able to store large amounts of energy while only taking a fraction of the time to charge compared to batteries. Imagine a cell phone you could charge in a few seconds or an electric car that only takes a few minutes to charge up and not a few hours. This has been the central property of a new discovery made by Dr. Richard Kaner and his colleagues. They found that they could convert liquid graphite oxide into graphene using only a consumer grade DVD drive.
The Super Supercapacitor by focusforwardfilms
Things like the cell phones or smart screens that can be rolled up, or ultra thin computers could become a reality because of graphene. Think it doesn’t get much better than this? Think again. On top of all the wondrous possibilities graphene could have for cell phones, computers and car batteries, but because this material is purely made out of carbon it is not only bio degradable, it is completely compostable.
I don’t know about all of you but I’m pretty excited for what the future holds now.
