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If it weren’t for the captions, I would assume that every single photo in this article was stock photography: “Scientists doing sciencey things.”

I like the second picture where it looks like the professor is making sure that the material is indeed one atom thin, but not two!

Maybe the photographer told the scientists - your apparatus doesn't look right - here use this pipette and beaker for the photo.

What we can say for sure is that the editor of the article chose very generic science-y photos.

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.

Personally I suspect some of the activities are "staged", because it would be weird to have a camera at that angle otherwise, but representative of things that actually occur.

I'm not really sure anything done in the average lab makes for a great picture tbh.

But look at their faces, they're having a gas.

Having been the subject of a number of photos for the local paper when I was a nerdy high-achieving high school student, awkwardly posed “candid” shots are kind of par for the game.

I didn’t get that impression since the characters are recurring.

Repeating characters doesn't mean "not stock". Consider https://www.shutterstock.com/g/antonioguillem - you've seen some of his work. https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/disloyal-man-walkin... ... and an entire story of stock photos https://www.ladbible.com/community/weird-extra-pictures-show...

In fact week before last, John Oliver had a segment about his favorite recurring model in stock photos on Last Week Tonight. Also interesting to note that some well-known actors (or at least two) got their start modeling for stock photos.

Well played guys. I mean well actuallied. ;)

Is single atom thick gold somewhat optically transparent?

Definitely yes. Gold is surprisingly transparent for a metal. Famously, gold plating is used on astronaut helmet visors, at 200 nm thickness - i.e. ~1200 atoms thick.

Is it more transparent than other metals? How transparent is a 200 nm film of iron or aluminium?

Not transparent at all on visible light wavelengths. Light transmission in metals obeys the skin effect, which means that AC fields (such as the fields in light) do not like to penetrate deep into the material, and the skin depth for visible light wavelengths in most metals is expressed in individual nanometers.

It is also used as a coating for window panes, as it‘s great at reflecting infrared radiation (reducing heat loss). My father‘s house has such windows.

Stealth aircraft also use gold-plated canopies to a) contain emissions from the cockpit to the cockpit b) reflect incoming radiation of a well-defined surface instead of whatever mess is inside the cockpit.

Are those windows expensive?

Yes, but mostly because of the manufacturing process (requires a vacuum).

TIL! Thank you for sharing - love me my chemistry after all...

For those who are curious: it fends off harmful EM radiation

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1997/hm2.html#:~:text=A%20th....

I would suspect it is essentially invisible to the naked eye.

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.

Thin gold layers are green, this looks red if you look at the beaker.

There are spectral data available in the original publication https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4

If I am reading that right, the beaker is filled with lots of sheets and clumps of sheets not just a single one. So, it’s not clear what if anything a single sheet would look like.

I think gold reflects red light, so it lets greenish light through if you use it as a filter.

I mean, matter is mostly empty space…

Only if you really distort the definitions. The "empty space" you are thinking about is the matter. You can't just put other stuff there.

There's a similar wrong meme about how you never really "touch" anything.

> 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?

How about this: two objects are touching when the interaction forces between the objects are of similar magnitude to the interatomic forces within the objects. Very generally speaking, this will happen when the distance between the objects is about the same as the distance between atoms within the objects.

Ok, so I conclude from this that touching is not an exact science.

To be somewhat pedantic: "touching" is a word. The extent to which it is or is not an "exact science" depends on what is meant by "touching", and by "exact science". The definition I gave of "touching" could be made arbitrarily more precise by specifying more precisely the interaction forces under consideration, and the level of precision to which one should compare their magnitudes. What you mean by "exact science" is something I cannot guess at with any useful level of precision. Whether or not any of this has any bearing on the original topic of discussion is another matter.

I mean, the actual interaction force that defines "touching" is open for debate. Touching is an abstract concept, removed from actual physics.

That was sort of my point. If we use a definition of "touching" that is relevant to the atomic scale, whatever that definition is, we can reasonably talk about what "touching" means at an atomic scale. If we use a colloquial definition of "touching" which is meaningful for macroscopic objects but not at the atomic scale, it doesn't make sense to talk about "touching" at the atomic scale.

When weak interaction starts happening.

When does the weak interaction stop happening?

High energies, about three orders of magnitude higher than the LHC produces. (If you squint.)

Do this for 'touching fire' to clarify the actual issue.

There isn't an exact moment, any more than there is an exact height that is "tall". And yet, tall people exist.

The tallest person in the world will say that only normal and short people exist.

I'd bet very good money that they wouldn't say that, no

except protons. These are infinitely dense

Wish the Anunnaki just left notes on how they did it. Joking aside, suddenly gold is all over the news, e.g.: "Composite material adorned with gold nanoparticles improves infectious disease testing"* Gold is also going up in value due to global instability. What I am really getting at is - are there any "actual" applications at this time? Also, if anyone feels like summarizing what I could google - did graphene ever live up to the hype, or still too expensive to produce and not quite what it was advertised as?

* https://www.mining.com/composite-material-adorned-with-gold-...

> What I am really getting at is - are there any "actual" applications at this time?

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.

Science drives products, though. Very few people would be interested in a square inch of refined sand flipping electric charges between positive and negative, if it didn’t result in a yellow circular man eating dots and chasing ghosts.

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

You still need to have some delineation. Science drives new applications, yes - that's why approximately anyone with money is interested in funding it[0]. But it's also not why it's done by practitioners. Scientists tend to be interested in things just because. And then there's rarely a direct connection between foundational research and applications. Like, I doubt any of the physicists that gave us quantum mechanics, nor any of those who gave them the mathematical tools for it, were remotely thinking that this will enable Netflix and HDR TVs.

--

[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.

It's not going up in value, it's going up in price.

Oversimplified TLDR:

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.

Reminds me of this Tom Scott video https://youtu.be/t60EfnqZKrQ?si=1NfOtkw10GZwE25Z

But what is cooler, using an ancestral Japanese forging reagent to make gold flakes in cysteine milk ("aureos" ?), or using scotch tape on a pencil ?

Do you have the corrected link ?

Fixed, thanks!

>"“We had created the base material with completely different applications in mind. We started with an electrically conductive ceramics called titanium silicon carbide, where silicon is in thin layers. Then the idea was to coat the material with gold to make a contact. But when we exposed the component to high temperature, the silicon layer was replaced by gold inside the base material,” says Lars Hultman.

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>)

Reading about the process, I suspect that this will be challenging to do at scale (the general issue with graphene).

This makes me want to make an Excel worksheet with each element on a row, and columns for mono-atomic, 1-d single-atom filaments, and 2-d ___ene sheets.

It would be interesting to research (Google) how many of them we can reliably make.

What is the greatest thing we have been able to use graphene for so far?

A (surprisingly for a newspaper) good article about its lack of commercial success:

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.”

That article puts nuclear in a "list of technologies that failed to make the grade". So I question everything else in the article.

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

Whatever your feelings about nuclear power, you can't really argue with the reason they think it has "failed to make the grade":

> “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.

The United States has failed at nuclear power. It's much more successful elsewhere.

Where is nuclear energy too cheap to meter?

Measuring success this way is nonsensical. Is there anything that is too cheap to meter? Are other forms of energy also unsuccessful until they produce energy too cheap too meter? This isn't serious criteria.

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.

Measuring success by whether the proponents delivers on their promises seems entirely fair.

By that criteria, everything is a failure. After all, it's the job of the proponent to oversell you on things.

What sort of life experiences have made you come to this conclusion?

Has nobody ever told you "come on, it'll be fun" and proven to be right by subsequent events?

Disagree. The comment is on price. Price is driven by a huge number of factors. It's not as simple as "if nuclear is successful, price is low otherwise it's high". One of those reasons is that when someone is more available you consume more, making price sticky.

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.

The price comment was not about "price is low"; it was about it becoming SO plentiful that the overhead in metering the cost would exceed the revenue and it could be just an on/off subscription

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-...

I guess we differ in that you call generating 20% of the energy in the USA "not a success" lol

Yikes. I specifically said it was a success.

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"?

You can buy "heat spreader" sheets on Digikey that are graphene. They're used to help spread heat laterally when you don't have much thickness to work with.

How quick do you expect a material science innovation to land in commercial products?

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.

Graphene was insanely hyped close to two decades ago though. Every other month you'd hear stories of things that could be disrupted by it. That was my recollection, though could be biased and me misremembering. But it feels like a valid question, especially since it has been two decades.

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.

Yep. They made entire disciplines of nanoscience and nano engineering to train grads to do jobs that didn't exist. I was one very briefly before seeing the writing on the wall and moving to electrical engineering.

When I say "a decade" that was meant as an example timespan. Depending on how complicated the processes turn out you could also look at "multiple decades" or in some cases also "never".

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.

I got that, but the question wasn't "where are the mind-blowing stuff we should have had by now", but rather - what are the most significant uses we've found? In my mind also implying that we might have long ways to go for the full potential.

Perfectly reasonable question, especially considering past projections.

generating AdSense revenue

I wonder if somewhere there is a Graphene Store -- collection of all product utilizing graphene for it's properties. And it's empty.

I have a heating pad that uses it. It's supposed to penetrate deeper, and does seem to help my lower back.

If it's placebo, I'll take it.

Still in the experimental stage really. So I'd say spin injection and work towards useful spintronic devices

Transistors and energy storage probably.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079841

Why goldene and not chrysene?

Chrysene is already the name of a known hydrocarbon having polycyclic aromatic structure, 4 fused rings in a particular pattern.

Interestingly, it is a 2-dimensional (planar) compound itself.

Who's that Pokémon?

Why chrysene?

Graphene isn’t called carbonene, but, via graphite, indirectly derived from the Greek word γράφειν (to write)

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.

Graphite is a pretty common word, and it's easy to make the connection between that and what graphene is. Same goes for gold and goldene. Not so much for chrysos and chrysene.

Aurene then, from Latin aurum. Also, in Spanish áureo it's still used as 'golden'.

The point of systematic naming is predictability through consistency, not appealing to the lowest common denominator.

But Sweden isn’t exactly known for its stellar educational system, so it doesn’t surprise me that their chemists don’t learn Greek.

The most Greek a chemistry student in the states would get is from frat parties

Ancient Greece wasn't known for its great chemical industry.

Tell that to IUPAC, I don’t make the rules.

It sounds cooler

Glad they found what they were seaking

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Electron microscopes are capable of resolving details that small.

Here's a side-on view of what they did. You can see the individual gold atoms.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4/figures/1

And here's a top down view

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4/figures/2

Both of these are from the paper describing their process and results

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4

Thanks for posting the photos, I don't know why I had this image of perfect square sheet in my mind. Of course it doesn't work like that and they are more like shreds. Very cool to be able to see them.

That side on view is wild and I didn’t know that the resolutions of electron microscopes had gotten that good where you can make out individual atoms. Insane.

They have been that good for a while

Holy crap, I want one.

Scanning electronic microscopes can see and/or manipulate individual atoms. So, the answer to your question is simple: they took a look from the side and confirmed that it's 1 atom thick.

1. https://education.mrsec.wisc.edu/scanning-tunneling-microsco...

Small correction: Scanning tunneling microscopes can do that. They are basically a very sharp tip scanned across the surface.

Scanning electron microscopes, where a beam of electrons is rastered across the surface can not (yet?) resolve atoms.

* cannot resolve atoms on a surface, in transmission mode (STEM) and with the right sample, as in the article it's another story.

> Small correction: Scanning tunneling microscopes can do that.

Thanks! You're correct.

Per the article, an electron microscope.

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Why are you posting the output of chatgpt?

Here we go again... Another nobel prize, another decade of impotent battery news, and countless superconductivity false starts.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Only the horseman falls on the battlefield, how will that child fall who crawls on his knees.

Shah Abdul Aziz Dehlavi

Dude apparently didn't have a hand in raising any children if he's never seen a crawling child fall.

Failure exists at all levels.

Did you even read the article? It doesn't even have superconductor properties. It's classed as a semiconductor with 2 free sites.

You can get these in resin jewelry making kits. The gold leaf in those is super thin!

Not this thin, unless Chinese manufacturing has made heretofore unknown advances in materials science.

You jest, but I wouldn't put it past cheap Chinese manufacturing to somehow do this at some point in the next 100 years. "How did you invent a room temperature supraconductor? -we thought it would save us $0.00001 per part"

Eh, margins aren't that low on cheap Chinese gear with questionable IP rights. Not so low that they would develop an in house solution to a .02 cent market deficiency.

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

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If you can see or handle it, it's not a single atom thick.

Says you! Some of us have the skills required to handle a .0000003mm mechanical pencil. In 2B even!

Interesting, but that sounds like it's in the realm of tools, not direct handling. Either a normal sized pencil that contains that thickness of material, or a microscopic pencil that itself needs tools to be manipulated.

Graphene is definitely observable every time you use a pencil.

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.

I doubt you're ever seeing a single layer from a pencil.

"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-...

Graphite, not graphene.

Not true.

> part of the progress is due to serendipidy.

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...