I was winding down my computer stuff for the day when I saw two interesting headlines. Here are the introductions to the stories, under my modified headlines:
New Wonder Material, One Atom Thick
Imagine a carbon sheet that’s only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.
That’s graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It’s creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.
“It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
“A few grams could cover a football field,” said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce.
Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it’s as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll.
Consumers know less about the water they pay dearly for in bottles than what they can drink almost for free from the tap because the two are regulated differently, congressional investigators and nonprofit researchers say in new reports.
[…]
The researchers urged Americans to make bottled water “a distant second choice” to filtered tap water because there isn’t enough information about bottled water. The working group recommends purifying tap water with a commercial filter, however.
Now I must get to bed. I volunteered to take my Dad and my aunt to the Portland (Oregon) airport early tomorrow morning. To pull that off, I need to get up at three. 😯