Graphene is an amazing material but I think it suffers from the same problems as nanotube electronics - it's very hard to get the nanotubes to be positioned where you want them and connected in the topology that you wish. Geim's group has in the past used "exfoliated" graphene (basically the graphene is just peeled off with a bulk sample with scotch tape) And made some amazing discoveries that connect solid state physics to relativistic quantum field theory because of graphene's unique band structure. But for making electronic devices where you would want to pattern ~10^6 transistors, the exfoliation process is very hard to control and seems unlikely to scale well. When someone can produce a graphene sample the size of IC die call me. Still it does seem to have a lot of theoretical advantages over silicon, GaAs et. al. (especially the possibility of ballistic conduction)
This is neat stuff. Coincidentally, I just submitted my undergraduate thesis today, on the topic of carbon nanotube transistors. Our devices use multi-walled nanotubes, which are ~50nm in diameter. These things look to be an order of magnitude smaller than that.
Why are mainstream press science articles always so sensationalist?
Presumably because they mostly get the information first-hand and maybe people close to that source. Of course the people who have spent the last 5 years of their lives working on this stuff will hope that it is a major breakthrough. Plus, journalists seem to have a habit of intepreting tentative predictions as fact.
Will hope that it is a major breakthrough, or will say it is a major breakthrough in order to get more funding.
One problem is that in science there are (for the most part) no major breakthroughs, but a lot of very small breakthroughs which when put together make up a major one. But journalists are not interested in that, they just want to report the apple falling on Newton's head - which is not accurate most of the time.
This looks very interesting. I'm far from knowledgeable in this area, but I'd think radiation-created transient errors would be a serious problem with something this small.
So does this make Manchester the "Graphene Valley?"