The Most Exciting Scientific Discovery Of The Past Decade

    In the past decade there have been many notable scientific and technological accolades such us the increasing rise in hybrid vehicles, the common use of touch-screen technology, use of stem cells to rebuild muscles and for the use of heart regeneration and even the reprogramming of skin cells to function as stem cells. However, for me on a personal level, I find the discovery of Graphene by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov to be the most exciting of the last decade. Graphene is an allotrope of carbon (meaning it is a structure made of the element Carbon but in a certain form), whose structure is a single atom thick planar sheet of Carbon atoms in a hexagonal, honeycomb shaped, lattice with each Carbon atom attached to three other Carbon atoms. What is so special about this allotrope is that it was the first one atom structure known to man, in other words it was two dimensional. Of course with a scientific mind and no explanations, even the simpleton can begin to understand the vast potentials of this discovery.
    The following video is a simple introductory into Graphene produced by the European graphene flagship initiative, posted by Cambridge University onto Youtube.com, please do watch this video for a better understanding of Graphene:

    Only after watching this video do I recommend you to watch the following made by the same people, which further explains the importance of Graphene to science in a brief way and also explains the importance of the organisation who are now backing this substance:

    For their achievements in the discovery and continued research into graphene, the pair who discovered won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010, an award which I think they definitely deserved.
    It is because of the potential in Graphene that I am so excited about it. Imagine, your mobile phone as thin as a piece of paper, with tenfolds the processing speeds, brightness, battery efficiency weight and strength as it is even stronger than diamond, however these are just the cornerstones of what Graphene could provide us with in the future. Electronic components such as microchips and transistors could be so small that the naked eye wouldn't be able to define them on a clear sheet of paper. It is widely believed that soon enough, Graphene will replace Silicon as the basics of electronics.
    My interests in Graphene first started last year whilst I was doing GCSE electronics, and towards the end of April I was doing some research for my electronics project when I came across an article on the BBC website that contained a video which talked of how Graphene was in the run up for a grand prize of 1bn euros in funding in a prestigious competition which promoted the research into technologies that can change the entire world for the better. The following is a link to that very webpage on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9491789.stm

In other ways it hasn't really influenced my life or my studies, however the example set by the two Physicists who were common researchers doing their everyday work at Manchester University during the time of their discovery was an inspirational one, which showed me that in a similar way I could also achieve great things.

Once again thank you very much for reading my second post, and please check back for future posts...