Nokia begins work on graphene | Hacker News Reader

Nokia begins work on graphene

news.cnet.com

109 pointsbhauer48 comments

This is absolutely awesome.

Hopefully Nokia's involvement will result in the development of much more industrialized and efficient methods for making graphene/graphene oxide and cheaply layer it without using expensive lithography methods. Hopefully they will actually publish their methods instead of just patenting them.

Moreover, graphene may be cutting edge but it's incredible how accessible it is to citizen scientists. There is so much to explore and it's been less than a decade since graphene was first made. Full blown vapor deposition may be out of reach but there are plenty of chemical only methods or methods that require low vacuum (basically a bell jar vacuum) or high pressures/temperatures achievable without a lab. It was, after all, first produced with scotch tape.

Being that this tech was funded by a European grant, are they not under obligation to publish research?

No idea, these grants have complicated terms and probably quite a few loop holes.

They'll still publish lots of the basic research but maybe not the really valuable industrial stuff.

I do not think so: European Universities are largely State supported and afaik can patent whatever they want.

But I do not know about this grant specifically.

It's not uncommon for grants like that (in the US at least) to grant exclusivity rights for a period of time as a way to help motivate the research.

Patents are publications. You have to detail the whole of your method for the patent to be valid.

In return you are protected for a limited period.

The alternative is keeping things secret, like the recipe for coke!

In Theory. In Practice it's often simply the statement of a vauge end result.

I'm kinda torn about such announcements.

Here's a new material that is stronger, lighter, and thinner than anything else on Earth. 300 times stronger than steel! One atom thickness! How cool is that!?

So you have this amazing breakthough and the (first?) application to use it is... "build cell phones that are extremely light, durable, and less susceptible to overheating"? Seriously? Should we feel excited for shaving off a few grams of weight from 0.12 kg toy gadgets and making them last longer? Most people rush to replace their iThingie N when then iThingie N+1 hits the stores after a year or two anyway. Are these real problems, even as first world problems go?

Reading such news feels like hearing about a child prodigy with PhD in quantum physics at 16 working on ad targeting problems for Zynga...

I disagree. For one, they aren't the only company included in this consortium. Having motivations of productization is actually a fantastic incentive for them to develop the technology to where it can be manufactured at a reasonable cost. Their work with the rest of the consortium will do wonderful things to bringing graphene into everything from consumer electronics to space exploration.

I'm sure it will expand over time in multiple industries. Think Kinect. It started as a gaming device but is also starting to be used in physiotherapy and other medical applications.

It is by no means the first application and certainly not the one Nokia will focus on. They will continue basic material science research into flexible electronics, LEDs/LCDs, and power storage.

Graphene's uses are many more, however, including water filtration, transistors, meta materials, sensors, etc.

it doesn't really matter what the first application is. what matters is, they are trying to apply graphene to an application with HUGE SCALE. this will (hopefully) make all other applications also more viable (i.e. cheap!).

When you have one factory churning out millions of parts, they will want to keep their machines going 24/7.

I look forward to future kickstarter projects utilizing graphene casing, made by a nokia factory in between larger runs....

There is one thing that worries me about graphene. Its structure resembles me a lot the structure of cyclic aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzene.

Now, we know that these compounds are extremely stable and resistant to heat, such as graphene. But we also know that, because of this, these compounds are extremely carcinogenic.

Therefore my worries: wouldn't graphene also be a powerful carcinogenic?

We had the same problem with asbestos and recently with nano-tubes, right? It was discovered they are carcinogenic precisely because they are extremely stable.

Asbestos is dangerous when it goes in, and when it comes out. The pipes in my house are insulated with Asbestos, but as long as I don't go break the insulation apart, I'll be fine.

In many cases, Graphene or nanotubes will be used in a fixed form - they (hopefully) won't be used in aerosols. In something like an electronic component, the fullerenes would be locked in a plastic cage.

You've probably inhaled graphene, nanotubes, and bucky balls if you have been around a bonfire.

Good point. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130115111551.ht...

Graphene is fundamentally the same thing as the stuff in your pencil. If graphene is carcinogenic, we've already been exposing generations of people to it.

Most pencils are made of graphite which is a form of carbon.

And graphene is made of carbon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

graphene is single-layer sheets of graphite. Graphite is made of bazillions of graphene sheets stacked and folded on top of eachother every-which way.

so so many organic compounds, inside and outside the human body, contain aromatic rings. graphene may be toxic, but not because it resembles benzene.

chemically its not likely to be any more harmful than graphite, though because of the nano scale of it, if it were to be inhaled (unlikely probably), it could be as harmful as asbestos or other sharp, irritating, harmful particles.

I think people are completely misreading this. It's not 1.35 billion to Nokia. It's 1.35 billion to fund research in the area by many companies / universities / etc, with Nokia being just one of them. (Or at least that's how I read the article).

Yea, this CNET story is a badly rewritten and less informative version of Nokia's press release which includes the fact that the winner of the money is the Graphene Flagship Consortium which consists of 74 different groups including many universities and governmental research institutions. Nokia is just representing the electronics sector in the consortium.

Exactly. This was one of the two European flagship projects that were selected to receive a big research grant. The other was the Human Brain Project. These grants are given to consortiums that include universities and private companies. These were the contenders:

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/fet/flagship/6pilo...

And here's the consortium for graphene. Notice that the leader is the Chalmers University of Technology, Nokia comes in 8th:

http://www.graphene-flagship.eu/GF/index.php

I think we can at least partly blame the subtitle, which explicitly (and incorrectly) states that Nokia won a 1.35 billion grant.

"... and looks a bit like scotch tape, only infinitely thinner."

Sounds like they just stuck this in because they heard the words scotch tape and graphine mentioned together.

Graphine was first made using a the scotch tape technique by pulling graphene layers from graphite and transferred them onto thin SiO2 on a silicon wafer.

Also it's not infinitely thinner.

I watched the video first, and most of that article seemed to be haphazardly and sometimes inaccurately ripped from that video

So, just to clarify my own confusion. It's not actually "2D" it's that it's one atom thin, so that it might as well be 2D? Or am I mistaken, and it is actually 2D? Because what I am understanding is that it would still be a 3D atom? Or is there something that can explain this better. Thanks.

Can anything exist in "2D" considering we live in a "3D" world?

Rainbows?

What? Rainbows are as thick as an entire cloud.

It is 2D the same way your drawings on a whiteboard with a white-erase marker are 2D. The ink left by your pen has 3 dimensions, yes, but the drawing is for all intents and purposes 2D.

It's the same with graphene. The sheets are composed of 3D atoms, but the structure of a sheet is for all intents and purposes 2D.

For those like me who never heard of graphene - watch the video at the end of the page - it's fascinating.

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTSnnlITsVg

Computer. Hello computer. A keyboard? How quaint.

Seems better than transparent aluminum. Reality trumps 1980s science fiction soon? I can't wait.

>Forget diamonds, graphene is now the world's hardest material.

I thought Wurtzite (cubic) boron nitride still held that title?

Damn it, I thought it meant this: http://jondot.github.com/graphene/

Is Nokia still an European company? Didn't they close down the Finnish HQ and opened one in US? I hope they don't intend to use any of that money to prop their mobile business, and that they intend to open the results from that research at least to other European companies.

As far as I know their headquarters is still in Espoo, Finland. They recently sold the building, and leased it back in order to raise cash, but they haven't moved out of the country.

So a has-been telephone company that has less than a year to live gets a nine-digit check of taxpayer cash to do research in an area that is completely out of their competency?

Sweet job if you can get it.

No, they’re one of the recipients of the grant.

Ah, makes more sense. I should read more closely.

Have anybody thought to use graphene in batteries?

At first I was worried this was more research in graphene transistors. Graphene transistors would be awesome, don't get me wrong, but building phones out of graphene seems both much more achievable, and a much more appropriate area of research for a company like Nokia!

If only the government would give me a free grant of $1m!

If the run this like their phone business they'll fuck around for years with multiple, conflicting, self-defeating research projects. While better companies create whole new industries with graphene. Then throw out all their research and prototype products, declaring Aluminum is the future after they hire an ex VP of Alcoa.

A $1.35B government grant over ten years? Talk about proping up your dying industry. Surely there are research universities and any other number of more capable research groups that could benefit to divide such a huge grant. This is a mobile phone company with fairly little investment in materials science from what I can tell. Unless injection molded plastics count.

http://research.nokia.com/

Nokia still has almost 100,000 employees. Their research unit is over 500 people and world wide. Anyway, this money probably won't all go to Nokia as it is likely to collaborate with a lot of universities.

A little bit of context here : The graphene project[1] is one of the two "flagship" research projects in which the European Union just announced it will invest €1B over ten years. The other winner is the "human brain project"[2]. Those two were selected out of the 6 finalists [3].

The thing about those projects though is that no single institution or company is getting the €1B. In each project, the partners are distributed over all Europe and include the leading universities.

Now, according to the graphene project webpage, two Nokia researchers will take part in the project[4]. And from their short bio, it looks like they work with graphene.

[1] http://www.graphene-flagship.eu/GF/index.php [2] http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ [3] http://www.fet-f.eu/ [4] http://www.graphene-flagship.eu/GF/consortium.php#p8

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