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 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.
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.
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.
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/
https://www.tennis.com/gear/2015/02/racquet-review-head-grap...
https://www.tennis.com/gear/2020/07/racquet-preview-head-gra...
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?
That said, apparently it's been going down in price quite rapidly by order of magnitude: https://www.graphenea.com/pages/graphene-price#.XyDfAGkpCNw
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)
I wouldn't be surprised if it takes another 20 years to take off in actual products.
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.
Many trail shoe manufacturers are now using graphene in the soles for better grip.