Whatever happened to graphene?

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Hello, and welcome to BBC Inside Science.

I'm Victoria Gill.

Graphene is certainly something everyone needs to know because it's coming very fast and very heavy.

I believe in five years time it will be a household name.

That was Nobel Prize winner and godfather of graphene Sir Andre Geim in 2010, speaking just a few years after his groundbreaking isolation of this weirdly wonderful two-dimensional material.

Today we're asking, 20 years on, what of the graphene revolution that was promised?

And how can you destroy a city killer asteroid?

But first, this week nations are gathering for COP16.

Nope, not that COP, this is the other one.

This meeting isn't focused on climate change, but on biodiversity, the variety of species, all life on Earth, and how to stop its ongoing destruction.

The summit in Colombia is the first since nations signed a global agreement two years ago to reverse nature loss by 2030.

And it's a crucial chance to map out how exactly countries will achieve that ambitious goal.

Joining me now to discuss this is Professor Dame Angela MacLean, the UK's chief scientific advisor, a government role right at the interface of two very different worlds of science and politics.

Angela, welcome to Inside Science.

Thank you very much.

Now, the last conference in 2022, the UK was among 200 countries that committed to protecting 30% of land and sea for biodiversity for nature by 2030, this 30 by 30 target.

Now, the world's way off track for that at the moment, and we're off track in the UK as well.

Where are we going wrong?

I don't think we are going wrong.

I think we need to crack on, I think I would put it that way.

So we've developed legislation domestically and also some policy.

We have the Environment Act and the Environment Improvement Plan, both of which are going to be updated.

My role is to deliver science advice for those bits of legislation and policy in general, to continue to provide the data that we need, first of all, to choose sensible targets, and then also making sure that the data we collect does actually reflect the target that we're interested in.

And finally, to build strong evaluations so that when we make interventions, we can tell how well they're working.

So the decision makers, by which I mean politicians, can make decisions that are really underpinned by excellent science.

And so, what is the science showing us about how we can change things in this country?

We have that target now.

2030 is getting alarmingly close.

Could you give me kind of an example of what the science shows us we should be doing differently?

Well, my favourite example actually is the Flow Country in northern Scotland.

So, this is this, it's nearly 2,000 square kilometres of blanket bog of extremely important land that is still wild land.

And one of the things that I'm really interested in that's going on there is basically making a collaborative partnership with the people who have lived and worked there for a long, long time to think about this as not just a science question, but also an economic, social, cultural question to drive conservation policies that appreciate the existing connection between people and the land.

And one of the big sticking points at these negotiations is going to be how do you fund that conservation and how do you sort of entwine it with growth and economic prosperity.

One of the really thorny issues that I find really interesting is when you extract something from nature that could be profitable, like a medicinal plant or genetic information that you can take from nature, how the huge profits that might come out of that go back into protecting nature.

Can you shed any light on how that can happen?

That's a hot topic of discussion, probably as we speak.

It's a priority for the UK to make sure that the benefits derived from those science technologies do flow back to the biodiverse parts of the planet.

If you don't mind, I'm not going to go any further than that because I would really hate to mess things up.

However, I would say one of the things I really, really think we can do as a country is to

help with the training of people who live in biodiverse places.

I had the great very great good fortune to go and visit Madagascar and the really encouraging thing that I saw was people from Madagascar having having done training here at the University of Bangor, they're now back in Madagascar, absolutely central to the drive to conserve the fantastic biodiversity of that country and they're going to stay there.

It's a tricky area to communicate with politicians and decision makers.

Why did you want to take on that tricky role?

I think deep down the bit I love is that sort of Babelfish job.

So being a translator in between the the worlds of policy and the world of science.

By getting them to articulate their question very, very clearly, I can help them find the bit of science that is actually going to help them do their job better.

Professor Dame Angela MacLean, thank you very much.

Thank you very much for having me.

Now, as I sit in this three-dimensional studio with my three-dimensional producer, Gerry.

Hello, Jerry.

Hello.

It can be difficult to even imagine the material that we're going to talk about next.

Graphene is a material that's so thin, it's just one one carbon atom thick, and it's considered two-dimensional.

And when it was extracted from a piece of graphite in Manchester back in 2004, it created a huge buzz.

It's a million times thinner than a human hair, stronger than steel, and more conductive than copper.

Breakthroughs in everything from construction to computing were predicted.

A new age of graphene.

But that was 20 years ago this week.

And, well, it doesn't seem to have taken over the world just yet.

So what exactly happened?

Here on Inside Science we're going in search of the graphene revolution.

It's a journey that begins at the University of Manchester with one of the people who made the very first flakes of this remarkable material, Professor Sir Andre Geim.

Would you indulge us with telling the sticky tape origin story, please, since we have come to talk to you in the kind of 20th anniversary of graphene's isolation?

With benefit of hindsight it's quite trivial.

So I had a Chinese PhD student and I gave him a project, try to make graphite as thin as possible.

And

for a year he was struggling.

I suggested this and that, including polishing graphite.

So I gave him a big chunk of graphite and a few months later he came to me, I make it and shows me a small speck of graphite.

And I said, no, it's not thin enough to be of any interest.

So we struggled quite different ways and then a postdoctoral researcher here pointed out that

we

use

scotch tape on a regular basis.

So we took one of those pieces of the scotch tape looking in a microscope and seeing through the scotch tape allowed us to find graphene, which was eureka moment.

You look through the scotch tape there are sick pieces of graphite which completely non-transparent and then among those we found to our surprise very thin pieces which were transparent to light.

Graphite is a metal and if a metal is transparent it means that it's very thin metal and that was as I said eureka moment.

This kind of using scotch tape has been done for many decades by thousands of researchers.

They put graphite on top, peel it off, threw away this scotch tape without realizing that throwing away this scotch tape probably was throwing away their Nobel Prizes as well.

What were the properties that you went on to be able to describe in that groundbreaking science paper?

What were you able to show about how this two-dimensional material behaved?

I always said the first paper was not as important as our second paper.

In our second paper, which was published a few months later, we have shown that this kind of two-dimensional material, there are many of those, that graphene is not alone, showing that it's a whole class of different materials, which is still not much appreciated outside the narrow scientific community.

That discovery was 20 years ago.

So what's happening in the two-dimensional material world now?

I met James Baker from the Graphene Engineering Innovation Center, the aptly named Geek, an institution dedicated to making useful stuff with graphene.

Geek is very much around how do we accelerate this new material graphene.

Can you show us around?

Sure.

So for me what's really exciting is you can use the 2D material almost as an additive.

So by adding a small amount of of graphene to concrete or to a plastic or to a battery, you can start to improve the performance.

You can make it stronger, you can make it a little bit more.

You can make it stronger, you can make it firmly conductive.

So, for housing, insulation, but it's also flame-retardant and reduces noise.

So, graphene has this fantastic multifunctional property.

I'm even wearing a pair of graphene shoes with graphene in the rubber.

Why do I put graphene in the rubber?

I get something that's very grippy, but it's also very durable.

So, it means I can run this.

it.

I was looking at a website this morning that was listing graphene products that included graphene.

Are these kind of they're all real and you can buy them from shops?

It's not just for marketing.

It's not for marketing and that's a really exciting thing.

Hopefully we'll show you today that graphene is still 20 years young.

Okay, let's see some things that are made using graphene.

So what we have as an example is our composites lab.

So this is the composites application lab and we've essentially we've come into what looks like quite an industrial room.

So there's lots of extraction pipes going around the ceiling and kind of ventilation equipment.

And around the room, we can see benches that are obviously for kind of mixing handling materials.

We've got ovens and incubators and kind of processing stations, and that looks like some sort of vice.

What happens in here?

So, what we have here, if you like, is someone's sometimes people call it like the picks and shovels of the graphene industry.

Right.

So, it's the equipment from industry that mixes graphene into a polymer, then produces that mix or master batch into a product, and then tests it.

The heart of the geek behind a heavy door is a high-ceilinged vault with lots of much larger industrial equipment.

Here, James showed me a prototype, an aircraft wing made with graphene that's ready for the industry to test.

So we were just in the sort of composites mixing and trying out recipes kitchen.

This is where those materials, when they are, when there's something that will actually be producible into a product, are made into those products.

It could be, yeah.

So, what you have there as the wing is some carbon fibre.

We've created a graphene resin that we mix next door.

We then combine those together into a carbon fibre product that we've baked in our autoclave.

So, aerospace is an example.

If it adopted graphene, you could get aircraft that are lighter, use less fuel, lower emissions.

But also, also the multifunctional part of graphene means you can do things like de-ice the wing, you can do something called lightning strike protection.

I mean you do talk about it like it's this wonder material.

When I told people I was coming to this center today, one of the questions was, oh yeah, that amazing material, what is it useful for now?

It's not achieved that kind of world-changing

potential that was really trumpeted.

But you know, what would you say?

How useful is it?

What's it in now that really affects people's lives that people are using?

Some of the superlatives we use, like 200 times stronger than steel, more conductive than copper, transparent, flexible, perfect membrane.

Now they're all true, but they're at that nano scale.

Practically, industry needs things that they can touch, they can feel, they can use.

So really, there was a gap from that scientific understanding into translating into viable products and applications.

So early days, there was a lot of hype around is going to change the world, and industry and people became impatient.

But 20 years old, graphene is actually growing up, and people are now using graphene in shoes, they're using it in clothing, they're using it in paints, they're growing plants in it.

How much is that hype, and how much is that useful?

So, tennis rackets is a good example, it was one of the fairly early products, a very, very small amount of graphene in the head of the racket.

If you follow the science, it means they can engineer the head of the racket slightly lighter, that improves the balance, that if you're Jokovich, means you can serve a little bit faster.

Okay.

Makes marginal gains, but it's not really big.

On shoes, there's some really great data that show for athletes are now breaking records with the graphene rubber because they've got more grip.

But if you talk to the athletes, they also say that they used to throw the shoes away after six weeks or 200 kilometers, now they're lasting over a thousand kilometres.

Better shoes and better tennis rackets is one thing, but one of the things that you have highlighted is sustainability, right?

Is the use of graphene to make things recyclable

and to make recycled polymers and plastics much more tough and useful?

Can we see some evidence of that happening in the game?

Yeah, so we're going to see some of our partners, and the best one probably to pick on is Vector Homes,

who are actually taking sheep's wool that traditionally is used for very cheap building products and making that into insulation for your houses.

Hi, so I'm Vicente.

I'm a scientist here at Vector Homes.

We're a startup working on sustainable materials for the built environment.

So, we've got what looks like kind of some balls of wool.

Wool is a fantastic insulator, and what we're looking to do here is drive its application in construction by creating a rigid wool panelling, which you can see here.

So, this is completely plastic-free.

So, then the next step with this is to then enhance the properties of the wool paneling by coating it with graphene and 2D materials.

So, you can see some of our wool here looks black, and that's originally white sheet wool, but then we've coated each individual strand with graphene and 2D materials to try and enhance the mechanical, thermal, and even the moth-proofing properties of it.

Graphene's moth-proof.

Well, that's some of our working theory at the minute.

So we're having some of these blocks with larvae in them at the minute who are trying to eat our wool and we're testing to see what kind of 2D material is.

Do you have marsh larvae in graphene-coated wool?

Yeah, at the minute, very much, yeah.

I need to graphene-coat my woolly jumpers.

It's like, yeah.

So, what does graphene then do?

So, you know, wool is a great insulator in and of itself, and you can kind of compress that into a block and you can use that as an insulation material.

What does graphene do to it?

How can we make it moth-proof?

So, wool is naturally quite fire-retardant, and what we're looking to do with by coating the fibers with graphene is to try and essentially create a barrier around these fibers that can also charge, try and improve those properties even further.

And that's really important for construction applications.

Can we buy graphene-coated wool insulation for our material?

You will be able to very soon.

So, I mean, the whole point of this building is to take this technology and bring it out in the lab.

That's why we come to work every day.

We're at the point now where we're looking to scale all this up and we're looking to start kind of commercial projects with partners, getting them out in the field from the start of next year, basically.

How impressed, excited have you been at the performance of graphene when you've kind of applied it to what you want to make?

How good has it been?

It's a very interesting material.

No material is objectively good or bad, it's how you use it.

And I think what we crave as material sciences is the challenge of of getting the most out of that material, understanding why it does and doesn't work in certain environments.

And we're getting some super interesting results with the latest batch of kind of graphenes that are coming out.

And it's really exciting to be kind of at the forefront of that technology and for that to be happening here in Manchester.

So that's where graphene meets the real industrial world now.

But at the National Graphene Institute, just down the road, scientists are looking at some of the future technologies that this material's unique properties could be harnessed for.

I visited the pleasingly messy laboratory of physicist Dr.

Qin Yang.

The idea is if you have these functional materials equipped on the buildings, then when it rents, potentially when the raindrop slides down through these functional materials, this very small electricity can then be collected together to power the household.

So imagine it's...

It sounds like very fictional to us now, but it might be one day really comes true.

Think about solar panel.

Many years ago, we probably can't imagine you can collect solar energy to power your household, but it's everywhere now used.

Good luck to Qin Yang and her team in their efforts to scientifically combine two great icons of Manchester, graphene and rain.

So what does Professor Andre Geim make of all this?

Once I was on a boat trip watching dolphins and it

was very unusual.

I watched dolphins many times before, but at this particular occasion they were so near the boat.

You can imagine this moment, romantic moment.

Everyone on this boat was at awe

for few minutes until a small boy behind shouted, Ma'am, can we eat them?

So in a sense,

this kind of questions,

how can we use this wonderful materials, gave the same impression because

we studied graphenes the landscape science landscape completely changed and we continued being curious about that

so what do you think your role is then what keeps you invested and excited in your research now I'm still trying to find pieces of gold somewhere around and trying to poke in different directions where no one has been before.

A small patch of grass, there is no tribe or school of elephants and no grass at all.

I was really curious as I looked around, just doing a little bit of research about what graphene is used in products that are sold.

And there was a website that had a list of products that were launched between 2023 and 24 that included a fishing rod, a bicycle, a helmet, some headphones.

I wonder what you thought about the sort of wonder material being marketed like that.

Some of those products

with

the usage of graphene are real and they improve properties.

But over the last three, five years, I learned something:

if the name is in the products, like graphene shirts or graphene helmet, it's most likely to be a hype.

Many of those products, like

paint, in this kind of products, it's not in the title.

It's nowhere.

It's used, it improves properties.

So, in a sense, when it really has impact, graphene and other three-dimensional materials becoming like, you know, copper or aluminum wire, which is used routinely to make products better.

Can you imagine our world without copper wire?

So, at the moment, graphene hasn't delivered any revolutionary products yet, at least.

Whether it would be revolutionary products, it will take another few decades, another 20 years at least.

So, maybe we can come and talk to you in 20 years, and our recording equipment will probably look quite different.

I'm quite happy if I live that that long.

That's the deal.

You don't have any graphene clothing or graphene trainers or anything?

You weren't tempted?

I had graphene shoes.

I gave it to someone.

You gave them away.

I have given graphene knickers.

Graphene knickers.

Yeah, and

socks, graphene socks.

I have.

Is this a kind of Christmas stocking for a theme for you?

You did the graphene for graphenes?

They were pretty horrible and

I think it's kind of a salesman trick in most cases.

I feel myself that I don't trust this one.

I have here

in my office I have graphene condoms if you are interested.

I had no idea that was not on the list that I saw.

It's actually quite

popular product

product in china yeah that is yeah there's oh so you've even got the molecular the the uh the beautiful 2d structure with the hexagons on the front yeah um

graphene graphene condoms yeah

wow it's small enough so you can keep it as a present to one

Thanks very much.

That is a first.

I've never been given a box of high-tech condoms during an interview.

Thank you to Andre Geim, especially for my gift there, and to all of my guests in Manchester.

It'll be fascinating to see how these two worlds of the beautiful science and the industrial utility come together in the future.

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At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Stories about policing or politics.

Country music.

Hockey.

Sex.

Of bucks.

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Now, as I speak, a spacecraft is making a two-year-long journey to an asteroid near Earth that NASA blasted a crater into back in 2022.

It's all happening in the name of planetary defense.

So, how do you kill an asteroid?

And why?

Volcanologist turned science journalist Robin George Andrews has this handy guide.

In the early hours of June 30th, 1908, in a remote corner of Siberia, the sky suddenly erupted with a preternatural fury.

A few nomads sojourning in the area were flung into the air by a thundering howl.

Someone 25 miles away was propelled backwards through his hut, and in a heartbeat, 80 million trees were knocked flat as an area the size of Greater London was decimated.

This pandemonium was caused by a relatively diminutive asteroid, one just 50 meters long, and its mid-air blast was akin to a 12-megaton nuclear explosion.

Although asteroid strikes aren't a day-to-day concern, they do happen if you wait long enough, and space rocks 140 meters long are of chief concern to planetary defense researchers.

They are hard to detect and find their way to Earth far more frequently than the giant globally destructive ones.

They won't end civilization, but they could vaporize a city, which is why these relatively bijou asteroids are known as city killers.

So, if one were heading our way and telescopes caught it in time, how would we stop it?

The most popular method is something known as a kinetic impactor, an uncrewed spacecraft that would crash into the asteroid at breakneck speeds, causing it to recoil and change its orbit around the Sun.

Fortunately, we already know this technique works.

In September 2022, NASA piloted a car-sized spacecraft into a harmless city killer-sized asteroid named Dimorphos.

The mission, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, aimed to change Dimorphos' orbit around a larger asteroid named Didymos, and it did so with a plum.

I was there at mission control when it happened.

Hundreds of scientists cheered, roared, and cried with joy as they watched, in real time, their spacecraft's last moments as it hit a perfect bullseye on Dimorphos.

You must be careful though.

If you punch an Earthbound asteroid too hard, it will fragment into several smaller but still dangerously sized pieces, effectively turning a cannonball into a shotgun spray.

For bigger asteroids, or for smaller Earthbound asteroids discovered with little warning time, something with more oomph may be required.

A nuclear weapon.

Park a nuke armed spacecraft next to the asteroid, detonate, and one side of it will become severely irradiated.

That side will shatter and jettison debris into space, pushing the asteroid away from Earth as if it were a rocket.

If the asteroid were discovered too late to deflect it away from the Earth, we may try to completely vaporise it with ever more powerful nuclear detonation.

A hailmary approach that risks turning the cannonball into a now radioactive shotgun spray.

Alternative ways to save the planet are gentler, but require far more advanced warning to work.

One such idea is a gravity tractor, a supermassive spacecraft that would fly out to the Earthbound projectile, orbit it, then slowly fly in a different direction, using its immense gravity to yank the asteroid out of its Earthbound racetrack.

For now though, most of these planetary defense techniques are hypothetical.

Only one, the kinetic impactor, has been tested in deep space, and we can thank our lucky stars that it worked wonders.

Not content on leaving the task of saving the world to NASA, the European Space Agency is also stepping up to the plate.

This month, it launched the Hera spacecraft.

And lift off.

Go Hera, GoFalcan, GoSpaceX.

A robotic detective which, in 2026, will arrive at Dimorphos, the asteroid Impacted, to check America's homework while getting to know the very sort of asteroid that imperils Earth inside out.

We live in a timeline where completely cancelling out an entire category of natural disaster is now possible.

Planetary defence is a global endeavor.

When it wins, everybody wins.

And that is all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber, and Jerry Holt.

Technical production was by Diffan Rose.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West in partnership with The Open University.

And I will see you next week for some spooky science.

So until then, thanks for listening and bye-bye.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs.

Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully, make you see the world anew.

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