Graphene is a material with marvelous properties: It can be used to make square ice and night vision contact lenses. It can even be made from your leftover dinner. And soon this form of pure carbon--which boasts a super-strong hexagonal structure at just a single atom thick--may even light your home.
Trash into treasure indeed. A European Union-funded research project is working on turning thrown-away food into graphene, the Guardian reports.
Guy Le Lay says he's working his way down the periodic table. In 2012, he was the senior scientist on a research team that was the first to prove it had created silicene, a one-atom-thick array of silicon atoms. Silicene is the silicon equivalent of graphene, which is a flat array of carbon atoms with a number of potential applications in super fast computing. Silicon also happens to be just below carbon on the periodic table. Now, Le Lay and his colleagues are publishing evidence that they've made germanene, a material made of a single layer of atoms of germanium, the next element down the list.
Add another point to the list of reasons why graphene, the darling child of material physics, is a wunderkind. A team led by researchers at the University of Manchester has succeeded in turning magnetism on and off in graphene, an important step for the field of spintronics, the study of the way electrons spin in solid-state physics.
