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Graphene, a miracle in the offing [New Straits Time (Malaysia)]
[April 22, 2014]

Graphene, a miracle in the offing [New Straits Time (Malaysia)]


(New Straits Time (Malaysia) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) THE Philippines closes down for Holy Week (Christmas, too). Everything in the province is closed. It is a good time to research new science, since I have only artistic allegiance to Rome, and fervent admiration for a brilliant chief executive officer there.



So, I read up on popular science magazines, but the best piece was in The New York Times. Most of you are too young to have seen the epochal film The Graduate, where a middle-aged man bends over our young hero Dustin Hoffman and said "Plastics!" That is the future.

Now, think of a material 200 times stronger than steel. A small square inch of it balances on a blade of grass and a cubic inch would cover numerous football fields. It would simply revolutionise our lives, with light robot-driven cars, airplanes one per cent as heavy. Two scientists in England got a joint Nobel Prize for their work on it. It is a simple carbon. In the industrial countries with vast investments in heavy machinery, there will be huge lobbying to kill it.


However, what about a country with abundant cheap labour and just one Steve Jobs. They can start small and cheaply. More likely, the Chinese who will scoop up materials needed, and in 10 years will more or less have tested an iPhone equivalent on a thin piece of paper. Chinese scientists also created a graphene aero gel, "an ultra-light material derived from a gel, which is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass", so said The New York Times.

Look how fast three-dimensional printing has emerged. However, laser technology drives it. In fact, Samsung in Korea made the breakthrough in graphene and has a long head start.

Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else can. And, get ready for this: "It is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable...

"Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material... Graphene could change the electronics industry, ushering in flexible devices, supercharged quantum computers, electronic clothing and Crispin computers that can interface with the cells in your body," said The New York Times.

While the material was discovered a decade ago, it started to gain attention in 2010 when two physicists from the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize for their experiments with it. More recently, researchers have zeroed in on how to commercially produce graphene.

Apple became the highest-valued company at one point, less than a decade after it introduced the iPod. It was simply brilliant use of existing technology. It even beat Microsoft.

As I understand it, any materials scientist can master the technology of graphene in a short time. Twenty years ago, my rich Thai friends had RM10,000 cell phones. A RM150 Nokia outdoes it now.

Just 31 years ago, I bought what was really an advanced typewriter, which Exxon, the oil giant, tried to market as a computer. It could handle a long letter; multiple discs could do a manuscript. In today's terms, it cost RM60,000. Four years later, I gave my then 10-year-old son a 64,000KB personal computer. It cost RM650. He mastered most of the functions faster than I did, but if you see him on CNN on Wednesday nights in Kuala Lumpur, you will know he is smarter than I am.

Well, Singapore and Korea are billions of times better in Net- connections than here in my province. All in a generation. And, those brought up on binary thinking have a vast head start. Some even enjoy classical music - millions in China.

Talk about revolutions: there is another one affecting a billion people in Africa and the Americas.

"Now Harvard Business School needs to add another case study: Jorge Bergoglio, the man who has rebranded RC Global in barely a year," The Economist wrote tongue-in-cheek of my favourite CEO in Rome. He is better known now as Pope Francis, but he seems to think like a Harvard Business School graduate.

Meantime, I am fighting to live long enough to see graphene emerge as a reality along with a Roman church known less for paedophilia than inspiring a billion people - though not as much to see my seven baby grandchildren off to universities.

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