Haydale (based in the UK and owned by ICL from May 2011) plans to raise £10 million (about $16.6 million) via an IPO on the UK's AIM. Besides funding the company's regular operations (based around its proprietary plasma technology and graphene commercialization process), the money could also be used for acquisition purposes or to form strategic alliances. The market value of the company will probably be in the low £30 million range ($50 million).

Haydale hopes that the IPO will take place in mid-April. If Haydale's plans go through, this will be the third graphene company to list in the UK. First up was Cientifica (which recently failed to raise more funds) and Applied Graphene Materials. Another AIM company, Graphene NanoChem is also involved with graphene.

The EU launched a new project called PolyGraph that aims to develop new production techniques to deliver industrial scale quantities of graphene-reinforced thermosetting polymers.

It has been shown that adding even small quantities of graphene can simultaneously provide significant improvements in strength, toughness and electrical and thermal conductivity to a number of polymers. But there's still no scalable production method that can be used to make graphene-reinforced polymers.

Lomiko Metals announced that it has successfully completed its previously announced public offering. The company sold shares and warrants worth $5,520,800 (CAD, or almost $5 million USD) in the public offering.

Lomiko will use this money primarily for the exploration program on the Quatre-Milles East and West mineral properties (in Quebec), for business development and for working capital and general corporate purposes. Lomiko is also involved in several graphene related initiatives, together with Graphene Labs. On November 22, 2013 Lomiko and Graphene Labs announced the formation of Graphene 3D Lab to focus on the development of high-performance graphene-enhanced materials for 3D Printing.

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside and the University of Manchester discovered that coating copper with graphene (on both sides) strongly enhances the heat conducting properties of the copper.

The researchers say that coating the copper with one-layer graphene sheets increased heat conducting properties up to 24%. They say that this method could be used to built better hybrid copper graphene interconnects for electronic chips. The researchers explain that the improvement is the result of changes in copper’s nano- and microstructure, not from graphene's action as an additional heat conducting channel.

Researchers from the University of Maryland developed a technique to fold graphene squares into a "box", which opens and closes in response to an electric charge. The researchers packed hydrogen atoms into this "box" - and say that this is the most efficient hydrogen storage device ever - with a storage density of 9.5% hydrogen by weight. This outperforms the DoE's goal for 2020 (7.5%).

The researchers are now working to increase the density and say that they have already demonstrated an even higher density. This research was supported by the US NSF.

Cientifica said that the company wanted to raise around £300,000 - £400,000 ($500,000 - $650,000) of new equity capital, but due to difficult market conditions, this action failed (they shares were offered at a small discount to the current mid market price).

Cientifica's board said it will consider a possible fundraising in conjunction with a suitable investment opportunity later this year. It's not surprising that the company needs more funds - when the company floated in in October 2013, it raised only $289,000 (net) - and this will hardly be enough as the company aims to acquire and build businesses that make use of graphene materials

Event organizer Smithers Apex announced the first Graphene World Summit, a graphene-focused event that will take place September 15-16 in Kerkeley, CA. This will be a great event, I think - after all I'm on the advisory board, helping to choose the topics and issues...

The summit will focus on bringing together the scientific and business communities. Planned sessions at event include the global path to standardization, innovation and commercialization; investment strategies; material development and production case studies; and game-changing applications and commercialization success stories.

Researchers from Australia and Ireland developed a flexible yarn made from graphene oxide. This strong, lightweight, highly conductive and high capacitance fiber may be a great material for wearable textiles.

The researchers report that the new yarns and fibers exhibit the best electrochemical capacitance ever - of as high as 410 F/g. To create the fiber, the researchers used a novel wet-spinning technique that can produce both GO and r-GO yarns of unlimited lengths. Those yarns are strong (with a Young’s modulus that is greater than 29 GPa), have a high electrical conductivity of around 2500 S/m and a very large surface area about 2600 m2/g for graphene oxide and 2210 m2/g for the reduced material.

Grafen Chemical Industries announced that Dubai based investment company Al-Hamlah Investment Group plans to invest $1.8 million in the company - to help fund its R&D, production and supply business.

Grafen is currently focused on its CrowdLit business model, a customer specific supply chain nanomaterials development process. Grafen will use the funds mainly towards this model , but will also support it's current graphene R&D.

The EU launched a new project called Graphenics that aims to develop an ultra-compact graphene-based mid-infrared broadband light source. The project include researchers from Belgium, Austria, Poland and Canada. The hope to achieve a highly compact and portable device, that will pave the way to mid-infrared broadband light sources in applications such as medical diagnostics and optical safety testing of water.

The researchers say that the main issue stopping the widespread adoption of broadband mid-infrared light source is the source compactness and portability. The researchers hope to develop a chip in which both the chip and the pump laser exciting the chip are made extremely compact.