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Comment by irthomasthomas | Hacker News Reader

Are you living under a rock? There must be hundreds of products already using graphene. It's in batteries, sports equipment, building materials, electronics. E.g. https://hobbyking.com/en_us/graphene-5000mah-6s-75c.html

https://www.runningxpert.com/en/inspiration/best-inov8-runni...

https://shop.suninhouse.eu/gb/graphene-ir-heating-films/22-g...

   Concretene is 30-50% stronger than standard RC30 concrete and does not require steel reinforcement, meaning significantly less material is needed to achieve the equivalent structural performance. Although the material is more expensive to produce (approximately 5% additional cost), the reduced amount of Concretene results in 10-20% overall cost saving for the end customer.

https://firstgraphene.net/applications/concrete/

https://elecjet.com/products/apollo-traveller-graphene-usb-c...

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ultron-most-powerful-wire...

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Hey, can you please edit out swipes like "Are you living under a rock"? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

I thought the gentle scolding was appropriate to the scale of misinformation shared in this thread.

It is a disservice to the community to downplay the relevance of graphene.

  Modern building and urban infrastructure construction are among the largest consumers of raw materials globally, with cement and concrete manufacturing alone responsible for approximately 8% of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions globally. https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6360

And yeah, you would have to have been living under a rock if you are a hacker and you haven't heard anything about any of this stuff. This is cutting edge and it's really cool.

Whether or not you think the tone is justified, that type of thing is just against the rules. User dang is the moderator of this site. He will rarely intervene and if he does please follow his requests.

I know who dang is, I just don't see how the phrase living under a rock is offensive? It is a very trivial thing in my culture. Perhaps it is different in America, and I should be more sensitive, but the same goes both ways. To me, that phrase is only lightly ribbing someone who is out of touch with tech...on a tech forum. As I said, in my culture this is not meant as anything offensive and you could be more generous in your interpretation of my meaning. Particularly as I went out of my way to share so many useful links on the subject.

I think this is a case of the "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We all underestimate (by 10x or more) the impact that these swipes have when they're in our own comments. You know what your intent was and you know that it wasn't malicious; but the rest of us don't have access to that state (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Also, there is one of you but thousands of rest-of-us (i.e. readers), so your comment will have a statistical distribution of responses. Most people won't have any problem but inevitably, some tail of the bell curve gets activated, and this segment is by far the most likely to reply. This is how we end up with seriously degraded threads under relatively mild provocation.

It's true that HN's rules come (sadly) at the cost of making things more bland (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). But it's a mistake to think there's a viable alternative to that cost, because you can't allow for the creative/interesting/lively kind of swipe without opening the gates of flamewar hell. If you have a small, cohesive group, that kind of thing can work*, but not on a large open internet forum. So we're all stuck with having to err on the neutral side.

* I like the analogy of rugby: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I get the feeling that these "hundreds" of uses aren't really leveraging the materials' most effective properties. It would not surprise me, if the graphene does little more, than add expensive chrome to the brand.

Sort of like using a UPS unit as a doorstop. Looks fancy, but maybe not its most effective implementation.

Maybe like the "Truffle Oil" industry: https://www.tasteatlas.com/truffle-industry-is-a-big-scam

And, as far as I know, I am not living under a rock. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I gave a concrete example. Something that is in use today.

  Concretene is 30-50% stronger than standard RC30 concrete and does not require steel reinforcement, meaning significantly less material is needed to achieve the equivalent structural performance. Although the material is more expensive to produce (approximately 5% additional cost), the reduced amount of Concretene results in 10-20% overall cost saving for the end customer.

https://firstgraphene.net/applications/concrete/

"Concrete example" I see what you did, there...

Like I said, it looks like the only thing that is being done, is that they are using graphene to add a bit more tensile strength. I suspect that there are other materials that would work just as well (or maybe better). It's probably not the "killer feature" for graphene.

Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://www.theonion.com/bantu-tribesman-uses-ibm-global-upl...

All I've been able to find is some test slabs they poured in 2021 and a bunch of news/pr articles. It doesn't appear to be widely available or used despite the ease of doing so (it's just an additive added at the plant).

I'm not surprised that there is a lot of inertia. No one wants to be the first to recommend changing a 40 year old recipe for pouring concrete damns. But "just an additive" is really underselling it.

  The concrete slab was setting so fast, and so strong, that the builders had begun gliding polishing machines over the driest part of the floor while their colleagues were still pouring the other end of the rink.

  "Normally, you'd have to wait a week before you could do that," he says. The installation, in October last year, took less than a day.

  "By adding as little as 0.1% graphene into cement and aggregate, you can potentially use less material to get the same performance," explains Mr Baker. Reducing the amount of concrete used in construction for instance by 30%, could lower global CO2 emissions by 2-3%, he estimates

To put that 2-3% in perspective, the UKs total CO2 output amounts to 2% of the total. So this tiny little additive to concrete could have massive impact.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61913871

Concrete innovation doesn't have a great track record

The battery you linked is just a lipo battery that says 'graphene' on it, it doesn't have anything to do with graphene other than using the word for marketing.

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