August 2011

Researchers developed a new way to detect protein-protein interactions using graphene. This kind of detection is used to monitor how a disease-related protein interacts with libraries of small peptides. The idea is to mix a tagged peptide with Graphene Oxide, which quenches the fluorescent signal from the pyrene-bound peptide when pyrene stacks onto its flat surface. Then, when adding the protein that needs to be tested you can find out whether it binds to the peptide by seeing whether the tagged peptide leaves the graphene oxide and the fluorescent signal returns.

Researchers managed to fabricate electrochemical actuators based on flexible graphene paper. These kinds of devices can convert electrical energy into mechanical energy through stretching or contraction, behaving like artificial muscles. This has all sorts of potential applications - in healthcare and nanotechnology...

The graphene-paper actuators lengthen in response to applied voltage, due to changes in the carboncarbon bond length. The team managed to increase the response by magnetizing the paper using Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles.

A new study finds that by combining graphene with metallic nanostructures, there was a 20-fold enhancement in the amount of light the graphene could harvest and convert into electrical power. The team (which included last year's Nobel Prize-winning scientists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov) says that these new graphene cell devices can be incredibly fast - tens or potentially hundreds of times faster than communication rates in the fastest Internet cables currently in use. The problem was the cell devices' low efficiency as graphene absorbs very little light (around 3%).

They now found that this problem can be solved by combining graphene with tiny metallic structures known as plasmonic nanostructures, which are specially arranged on top of graphene. The light-harvesting performance of graphene was boosted by 20 times without sacrificing any of its speed.

According to a new research by University of Colorado Boulder scientists, graphene has powerful adhesion qualities. This means that graphene-based mechanical devices such as gas separation membranes are possible. Graphene's adhesion energies are several orders of magnitude larger than those in typical micromechanical structures.

Researchers from Korea report that graphene is better than glass for human neural stem cells (hNSCs) growth - exhibiting a greater ratio of neurons to glial cells. When using graphene as a substrate, cells grew well and stuck well on the graphene, and the substrate could deliver currents to the neural cells, which may be useful for neural stimulation.

Graphene can adsorb oxygen onto its surface (which changes graphene's electronic transport properties). This can be useful for Spintronics devices, but the adsorption is difficult to control. Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology developed a way to control the adsorption of oxygen by applying an electric field to a Graphene-based field-effect transistor (FET).

The density of carriers (electrons and holes) in the FET can be tuned by applying an electric field to the gate of the device and, when oxygen molecules then adsorb onto the device, the conductivity of the FET changes.

Nanotek Instruments and its subsidiary Angstron Materials developed a new graphene-based energy storage device - something between a battery and a supercapacitor. The new device is called graphene surface-enabled lithium ion-exchanging cells, or surface-mediated cells (SMCs).

Nanotek says that even the first generation devices (which aren't optimized yet) feature fast recharge cycles - and already outperform both supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries. Recharge time is 10 times faster than supercapcitor and 100 times faster than lithium ion while energy capacity is the same as Li-ion batteries and 30 times higher than conventional supercapacitors.

New research shows that graphene can be chemically doped using nitrogen atoms - which suggests that graphene electronics can use processes used in silicon based technology. The research also confirmed that you can use other elements (such as Boron) to complementary dope graphene.

As is the case in Silicon, the extra nitrogen atoms do not significantly modify the basic structure of graphene sheets.

Researchers from the University of Manchester (in partnership with other scientists at the Universities of Moscow, Nijmegen and Lancaster) published some new information about the interactions between electrons in bilayer graphene.

The researchers utilized superior quality bilayer graphene instruments that were fabricated by suspending graphene sheets in vacuum (this method could remove majority of the unnecessary scattering methods of electrons in graphene, thus improving the electron to electron interaction effect).

Dr. Bhagawan Sahu from the Microelectronics research center in Texas, Dr. Bhagawan Sahu is working on creating digital circuits made from graphene. Check out this interesting interview with Dr. Sahu - where he discusses the fundamental advantages of using graphene in electronics, and the potential for creating the first commercially available graphene digital microprocessors by 2023.