Goldene: A single atom layer of gold
liu.se
liu.se
Personally I don't think the activities in photos are staged: taking the samples out of the oven and the mixing of the etching acid are real steps they need to take, just not very interesting scientifically speaking.
I'm not really sure anything done in the average lab makes for a great picture tbh.
It likely only exists in extremely specific conditions, not just like a sheet.
I’m guessing it’s somewhat similar to a microscopic layer around a material that we never notice.
There are spectral data available in the original publication https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4
For those who are curious: it fends off harmful EM radiation
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1997/hm2.html#:~:text=A%20th....
There's a similar wrong meme about how you never really "touch" anything.
Ok, what is the exact moment you touch something? How close do the atoms need to be?
* https://www.mining.com/composite-material-adorned-with-gold-...
Of course not, they literally just figured out how to make it in a lab through what sounds like a very labor intensive process. They haven't (presumably) figured out how to mass manufacture it. They've probably just begun to characterize it's actual properties. Engineers haven't had their hands on it at all yet.
It's a very cool advance in science IMO! It's not a "product" and won't be for awhile. That's normal. Science isn't about making products.
Graphene shows some interesting properties, perhaps less widely marketable than video games, but time will tell. We’re still before the 8086 on that time scale.
For single atom thick gold? I dare not even speculate.
Though gold grabs extra attention due to its financial role, its over hyped in this particular regard. It doesn’t degrade and the global reserves can easily absorb some scientific research. All discussions of inflation and / or monetary value tossed completely aside
--
[0] - Though FWIW, refined sand flipping electric charges was found to be very interesting not because of a yellow circle eating white circles, but because it helped with designing bombs that eat cities.
They put rolled gold into a Prussian Red solution, waited a couple of months and then rinsed it in Palmolive solution?
It is possible they did not obtain the Prussian Red in the good old way of cooking blood and bones with potash but ordered it from the Internet:
https://www.morphisto.de/en/shop/detail/d/KIT%3A_Ätzmittel_n...
On a more serious note, it is surprisingly easy to create mono-molecular films. Allegedly Benjamin Franklin made one on Mount Pond near Clapham Common in 1774.
This phenomenon is called intercalation and what the researchers had discovered was titanium gold carbide."
Hmm, never knew about Intercalation before this... let's learn more about it!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_(chemistry)
>"By 2023, all commercial Li-ion cells use intercalation compounds as active materials"
OK, so Intercalation appears to be deeply related to the principle of energy storage (of which one specific subcase is Li-ion batteries...)
Also, there's this:
>"“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University."
If this is the case -- then the following would be an interesting question for all students of Chemistry, present and future:
Can all Periodic Table Elements -- be turned into semiconductors (specifically transistors) -- if they are only a single atom layer thick?
?
And, a follow-up set of questions (once that's known):
If any Elements cannot -- then which ones, exactly, cannot, and why exactly, can they not be?
?
???
(You know -- for all of the Chem majors out there! <g>)
It would be interesting to research (Google) how many of them we can reliably make.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/13/could-graphe...
> So what happened to the graphene revolution? Why has it not transformed our world? Sir Colin Humphreys, professor of materials science at Queen Mary University of London, has a straightforward answer: “Graphene is still a very promising material. The problem has been scaling up its production. That is why it has not made the impact that was predicted.”
I agree that nuclear is underutilized, but putting it on the same list as an electric bike that flopped is.... I don't even have words
> “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter” – Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.
Also, consider where that comment comes from. It comes from a person who benefits from arguing that nuclear has magical economic powers. So you're saying that it's ok to say "nuclear failed because it didn't live up to ridiculous hype?". No, nonsense. Nuclear has been a huge success.
This HAS happened with telecom services, where long-distance calls used to even be sometimes only one town over, and were charged by the minute. Toll-free (800)- numbers were a big deal. Now, the network is so successful and calls so numerous that it is literally too cheap to meter - you either subscribe or you don't. Per-call metering is only the case in some international calls.
Nuclear electric power could have become this ubiquitous and successful, where the overhead of per-kilo-Watt metering outweighed the revenues. It would have merely had to scale up several more orders of magnitude. THIS was the prediction.
Obviously, although nuclear did have some success this did not happen. The costs of commissioning, building, and decommissioning individual plants were just too high.
We cannot conflate the actual modest success, producing barely 20% of power in the US in 1995[0], with the prediction of nuclear succeeding like telecomm.
It did not happen.
I think it could yet happen with some of the new small (neighborhood-scale), self-contained, inherently safe designs. But that is another prediction.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273208/nuclear-share-of-...
But after 2/3 of a century, nuclear has clearly failed to attain the level of success of other technologies, and it's success has been capped.
Moreover, nuclear is now on a clear and accelerating decline. The peak was 1995, producing 20.1% of US power, and it's now fallen from 19.7% to 18.2% in the last two years.
I wish nuclear had enjoyed more success; it still may with new smaller-scale and inherently safe technologies.
But the current cost profile and construction profile is so far out of line with the continually-rapidly-declining-costs of competing solar and wind technologies, that current nuclear is only falling further behind. To build a nuclear plant vs solar or wind requires far more capital, has a far longer permitting process and construction process before a return on capital can even begin, and a far more costly end-of-life phase (notice we're not even mentioning the usual highlights of nuclear waste disposal, containment, and nuclear material proliferation). Nuclear has simply become an unmanageable option.
So, considering that it's success was limited, and is now in decline with no end in sight, how is it unfair to characterize it as "failing to make the grade"?
The argument is that this is a silly framing with which to judge success. I agree!
I for one am extremely content consuming energy, more than half of which is nuclear, followed by hydro. It is very successful.
Has nobody ever told you "come on, it'll be fun" and proven to be right by subsequent events?
E.g. if the superior quality of material X is proven in one study today, it might take at least a decade for material X to make it into a first run of a prototype chip series — maybe — if there have been a hundred follow-up studies that showed promise as well. Then how long does it take for that prototype chip series to feel like a viable alternative to existing, trusted solutions for product manufacturers? Most manufacturers will rely on the trusted, tested, known thing and only slowly will the new tech seep into their portfolio. At least another decade till you see significant adoption.
The truth is that what we have in terms of materials is already pretty good — matching e.g. the precision with which we can manipulate silicone is not a thing you might just reinvent with another material with the snap of a finger. And because what we have is pretty good realizing the advantages of a new material is not a matter of years, but of decades. And this is a matter not only of physics, but of new manufacturing processes, a ton of R&D and investment. In some cases this might be easier, because the new material can be used with old processes, in other cases it might demand entirely different processes that haven't been invented yet.
So everybody asking where the revolutionary thing from last years material science paper is just shows that they have no idea how the things surrounding them came to be. These things are moving far slower than you think. But they are moving.
Relevant section from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene :
> In 2004, the material was rediscovered, isolated and investigated at the University of Manchester,[13][14] by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".[15] High-quality graphene proved to be surprisingly easy to isolate.
Graphene has become a valuable and useful nanomaterial due to its exceptionally high tensile strength, electrical conductivity, transparency, and being the thinnest two-dimensional material in the world.[4] The global market for graphene was $9 million in 2012,[16] with most of the demand from research and development in semiconductor, electronics, electric batteries,[17] and composites.
There is also a section about applications that expands on it a bit.
A problem with today's science world is that the funding is competitive to a degree scientists need to "sell" their findings with practical applications — the fact they expanded the edge of human knowledge has become worthless. So our systemically incentivized-to-sell scientists do just that. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it is just far fetched bs. But because the edge of current science is so precise, so small, so ho, so cold, so fast, so low energy, etc. translating even the best of finsings into commercially scalable processes has become a major undertaking and despite unprecedented wealth on the top of the society, the ones on top have become averse to risk.
Perfectly reasonable question, especially considering past projections.
If it's placebo, I'll take it.
To be consistent, they’d derive from the Greek word for gold, which is [1] χρυσός (chrysós).
[1] or at least similar to. My greek isn’t good, and that’s an understatement.
But Sweden isn’t exactly known for its stellar educational system, so it doesn’t surprise me that their chemists don’t learn Greek.
Interestingly, it is a 2-dimensional (planar) compound itself.
Theodore Roosevelt
Shah Abdul Aziz Dehlavi
Failure exists at all levels.
I know you're jesting the jester, but Chinese manufacturing is on par with "the west" in terms of making money hand over fist on selling plastic junk, with minimal risk due to overpricing
It will mostly be graphite, but parts are graphene as well. And if that isn't enough, the tape method of producing graphene also makes a visible layer.
"Although graphene is probably produced every time one uses a pencil, it is extremely difficult to find small graphene crystallites in the “haystack” of millions of thicker graphitic flakes which appear during the cleavage. In fact, no modern visualization technique including atomic-force, scanning- tunneling, and electron microscopies is capable of finding graphene because of their extremely low throughput at the required atomic resolution or the absence of clear signatures distinguishing atomic monolayers from thicker flakes." -- Making Graphene Visible https://www.physics.purdue.edu/quantum/files/CarbonNano/make..., which shows it can be made visible by preparing it on an appropriate substrate.
More here, where the answer is both "no", and "yes, if it's big enough": https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Is-graphene-visible-to-the-...
Serendipidy means something like unexpected good fortune, but the folktale it comes from (The Three Princes of Serendip - weirdly nostalgic, link below) implies a different meaning.
The princes don't roam around with unbelievable luck; rather, they are aware of the world around them and consider what it implies.
Probably its meaning now has somehow evolved, which is cool. I pay a lot of attention to the (current states of) evolutions of things. I see it as a kind of refinement process, where valuable things persist. So the valuable thing in question is the idea of unbelievable luck and the raw material was a broad awareness of your surroundings and its implications. Maybe, through generations, people came to understand that the latter manifests the former and this realization became reflected in the usage of the word, resulting in its evolved (current) state.
Consider the sum total of all human reason required to evolve this word as the intellect of one person. This superintelligence has then made explicit the idea that awareness manifests luck, which also makes intuitive sense.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:The_Three_Princes...