Move over Graphene? Here Comes Borophene | Hacker News Reader

Move over Graphene? Here Comes Borophene

realclearscience.com

> Unfortunately, borophene looks to be more difficult to produce than graphene.

That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and commercialized or embedded into some market product? It's been 15 years anyways, I hope borophene is not just graphene 2.0 in that sense.

It's been used to induce spin in Tennis racquet marketing for more than 5 years now. /s

https://www.tennis.com/gear/2015/02/racquet-review-head-grap...

https://www.tennis.com/gear/2020/07/racquet-preview-head-gra...

Just like titanium (pigmented) golf balls.

How does putting graphite in the frame "induce spin" if the ball is contacting the strings?

Also - those sites are hilarious: > Graphene has been placed at strategic parts of the head and throat to optimize energy transfer into the shot. This is combined with Spiralfibers at the bottom of the hoop that stretch and untwist at impact to create more flex and enhanced feel.

They might as well say that each racket is aged for 72 days under a pyramid to concentrate the chi.

> By having more weight toward the part of the frame a player makes contact, the racquet can deliver more power. And by counterbalancing that with weight in the handle, it’s still maneuverable and easy to swing.

So it has more weight in the head. And more weight in the non-head. So, basically, it is heavy?

audio gear is the poster child for ridiculous claims followed closely by golf gear haha

Notice they said induce spin in the marketing, not the ball. I read it as a clever bait-and-switch pun, as "spin" is slang for misleading statements.

> That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and commercialized or embedded into some market product?

It's a chicken and egg problem. No one has really bothered to put graphene into a mass manufactured product because of supply issues and no one's got the resources to accelerate work on the supply issue because there's no demand. Actually using high quality graphene to e.g. improve the performance of a capacitor or a battery cathode/anode by a few percent is really easy once you are sure that any money invested in doing it at scale won't go to waste because of supply issues.

Aluminum when through the same exact process in the 1800s so it's a natural consequence of the intersection of economics and science. I've got an old Scientific American from right after the Civil War with pages of people talking about this new wonder material aluminum and how it will change the world of metallurgy forever (and how useless the "machine guns" were during the war and the repeated discovery of heat treating asphalt and a bunch of other cool stuff). It wasn't until the Bayer and Hall–Héroult processes were invented in 1886-8 that aluminum became cheap enough to use in every day things. It took something like 60 years from first pure piece of aluminum for mass manufacturing to become practical but only 30 years before it changed the face of transportation and war.

Really this sounds like a problem of missing government intervention. The government could treat graphene like corn until all the industries have built up around it

The problem is that there isn't a graphene farmers lobby group

How about instead of building and shuttering a billion dollar chat app every 2 years google puts some resources into it in the interest of diversification. All these tech companies are gonna need ever more batteries and Google would be well ahead if they can make the best ones.

Because rebranding a chat app as it evolves instead of calling it '2.0' doesn't imply you have spare resources to check notes utterly revolutionize battery technology out of nowhere.

Google's CFO's strategy has been to incubate those ideas and either sell them to industry or spin them off with independent investment after the, say, first $10 billion in costs.

It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to be going for it.

Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point. Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.

And that’s how Google wins these days, we turn to them to solve all our problems like a child praying to God every night before bed.

The National Graphene Institute has £61m of government funding: https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/about/ngi/

WhatsApp was acquired for $16-19b IIRC. (Or: "FB bought our contact books for $16-19b.")

I'm not saying that we could solve all of our problems by investing this amount of $$ in graphene, or that "FB sucks, duh", but it's hard to argue that we can maintain this ridiculous waste of resources and human brain power for longer.

What issue of Scientific American exactly? I would love to read that

I have a bound copy of Volume 16 [1] which as far as I can tell was just assembled from the unsold issue at the end of each year. Unfortunately they require a subscription to view the online archive and it feels very different when you've got an extant physical copy.

IIRC the machine gun story was page 1 and the first letter about aluminum was page 2 or 3 of issue 1. There was also a really interesting exchange between some laymen and a scientist about the nature of meteor but that was half way through the year. Both had some really crazy theories. Most of the interesting stuff like that is hidden throughout.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1867/01-05/

Aluminum as we know it now was rare enough it was more valuable than gold.

Would be fun to list evolution of resources from birth/high-cost to mainstream/near-free. And find inflections point.

I thought it never took off as a mass produced material because mass production was rather difficult (read: expensive)

That said, apparently it's been going down in price quite rapidly by order of magnitude: https://www.graphenea.com/pages/graphene-price#.XyDfAGkpCNw

It's amusing that they have a link to buy a square cm for $80 just above the graph showing that it will cost €0,1 in 2020.

In their shop, that’s just $76, and a square inch $113. Mounting on polymer film must be expensive, as, on copper, 15cm×15cm costs only €396 (less than $2 per cm²)

You get a coverage of “> 97%”, so it seems manufacturing isn’t that good yet (or, maybe, they keep the good stuff for themselves and sell the scraps)

Modern graphene work looks to have started in 2004, so it hasn't really been all that long considering that it takes time to work out how to produce it, how to actually make use of it, how to manufacture the things that make use of it, life span in applications, toxicity, etc. Also, any initial patents wouldn't have run out yet, which could prohibit bringing it to market.

I wouldn't be surprised if it takes another 20 years to take off in actual products.

Thing is, low level like material science often takes very long to take off. Even transistors didn't come out ready to use out of the box.

Also some university published a technique to produce "large" amounts of graphene with near zero tooling cost (google 'flash graphene'). If it does work close enough to what they claimed it might be a real push toward democratization of graphene use.

I think first you need a showstopper need. the alloy required for the oxy side pre-burner in the SpaceX's Raptor engine was a true breakthrough. they did it in months because Raptor wouldn't work without it.

It's used in Vittoria mountain bike tyres apparently. No idea how many they sell, so may not be mass produced as such.

> I wonder what actual applications with graphene can be seen in the wild

Many trail shoe manufacturers are now using graphene in the soles for better grip.

Ohh noo. Now all my “Graphene? More like Borophene.” jokes are obsolete.

They were getting a little thin anyway.

Sometimes the jokes just don't crystalize into something funny.

I don't get it

My take - graphene had tons of hype but never really seemed to have commercial traction - so was boring - borophene.

https://youtu.be/zaxH4xeMGzM

Damn, please put a disclaimer before the link.

Some of us can't stand Adam Sandler.

I really wanted to see Buildings that were 4x lighter, aeroplanes 5x lighter, solar cells > 50% efficient, Chips sped up by 5x beyond 7 nm, Solar desalination getting 10x cheaper but i have settled for the fact that Graphene is never going to be cheap enough to be mass produced unless by luck someone invents a process that works.

It will be restricted to niche applications based on its cost of production at a given point of time assuming it does provide enough benefits at that price point.

Aren’t most boron molecules very toxic?

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