All from the tip of a pencil

Like the fashion industry, nanotechnology has the latest hottest material.  These days for the fashion industry it might be stretch denim but for nanoscale science and engineering it is graphene, a material that has great potential for a variety of electronic applications.  Graphene? sounds like graphite, the stuff that is found in pencils?  Sort of?  Graphene like graphite is made of carbon, but graphene is made only of carbon and only one atom thick.  The carbon atoms are arranged where each carbon atom is bound to three other carbon atoms the same way they are bonded in carbon nanotubes or buckyballs.  Scientists who worked on graphene won the Nobel Prize in 2010.  Because graphene is a semiconductor it has lots of potential in electronics and because it is only a single atom think, sheets of it can be used to make flexible electronics. 
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