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Comment by icegreentea | Hacker News Reader

Isn't most of motorcycle safety designed to a) make sure no part of you catches the ground and b) spread out the energy as much as possible (spatially and temporally)? Cause I don't think just sheets of graphene would be very good at dealing with energy dissipation. You might not be able to break the graphene sheets, but the energy would just transfer through to your body.

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I think GP might be thinking of a third major concern of motorcycle gear, which is abrasion resistance so that when you are sliding, the asphalt doesn't sandpaper your flesh to the bone (road rash). Pedestrian jeans/jackets disappear in less than 0.5 seconds when you are sliding on asphalt after a 60mph crash; most crashes at that speed have you tumbling on the ground for a good 6 seconds. That means unless you are wearing good gear, your skin is likely to be scraped off to the bone. I don't know much about graphene, but it might be a good material for abrasion resistance, if it is suited for withstanding tearing, cuts, and shear forces like the elephant-on-pencil example in the article claims.

If the sheet of graphene can't be pierced, it would protect from the most common mild injury in motorcycle accidents: road rash. (Right?) It'd prevent direct contact with the road, it'd prevent your clothing being ripped off and your skin being turned into ground meat.

Not that I really know what I'm talking about, but that was my line of thinking…

A sheet of graphene is one atomic layer thick. It's very easy to tear apart or pierce with any macroscopic object.

A "sheet" doesn't neccesarily refer to the molecular structure. In this contex, it would mean several layers composited together.

Several layers of graphene put together is graphite, and it's pretty non-magical.

The article is talking about a 'sheet', in the colloquial sense of the word, of the thickness of a piece of cling wrap.

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