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Summary
A scarce wonder material could soon become a bulk commodity. Researchers at Rice University report in Nature this week that they can zap virtually any source of solid carbon, from food scraps to old car tires, and turn it into graphene—sheets of carbon atoms prized for applications ranging from high-strength plastic to flexible electronics. Current techniques yield tiny quantities of picture-perfect graphene or up to tons of less-prized graphene chunks; the new method already produces grams per day of near-pristine graphene in the lab, and researchers are now scaling it up to kilograms per day. And a new startup company called Universal Matter is working to ramp waste-to-graphene to an industrial scale.
