The new Emerging Technologies Strategy was announced by the British government, aiming to support cutting edge technologies and help the UK economy benefit from their development and commercialization.

The £50m fund will be distributed during the next three years, across seven areas: graphene, quantum technologies, emerging imaging technologies, non-animal technologies, energy harvesting, energy-efficient computing and synthetic biology.

Applied Graphene Materials, the British company which was admitted in the AIM in 2013, reports a pre-tax loss of £2.7m (which rose from £0.8m) for the year to the end of July. 

The company was established in 2010 as a spin-off from Durham University to develop a new graphene synthesis method and produce graphene materials, and is the proprietor of a unique patented 'bottom-up' CVD graphene production process. 

Haydale recently announced the forming of an agreement to acquire EPL Composite Solutions. The two companies have already collaborated in the past on several projects and this acquisition is meant to maximize EPL’s access to the nano-composites market and potentially boost Haydale’s sales.

The acquisition of EPL is a major step towards monetizing Haydale’s technology for incorporating graphene and other nano-enhancing fillers into composites. The introduction of nanofillers to EPL’s product range will produce the added benefits of impermeable barriers, conductivity and reduced weight with improved strength and stiffness. These benefits are capable of impacting the development of future composite structures. According to market researches, an $80m market for nano-enhanced composites is predicted by 2018, of which graphene functionalization promises to generate significant parts.

University of Manchester reared 2-DTech has been awarded two grants from InnovateUK (formerly known as the Technology Strategy Board). 

The first is an £80,000 grant for a collaboration with dental implant company Evodental to produce graphene reinforced polymers for fixed dental prostheses. The second is a £98,000 grant for partnering up with Australian group Dyesol Ltd. in order to explore the solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells. 

The seminal work by Manchester researchers, laying down elements of graphene research, was declared one of the most cited publications of all time. It has been cited more than 15,000 times, and is at number 65 in the top 100 list, produced by the journal Nature. 

In addition, Manchester researchers published other graphene and other 2D materials papers that have been cited more than a 1,000 times.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory declared their discovery on heating of the grain boundaries in a graphene sheet (the nanoscale defects where individual grains of graphene stitch the sheet together) when the material is made into a functioning transistor. While this new discovery implies potential for early device failure, the defects themselves might be exploited to make phase-change memories and better graphene-enhanced sensors.

The team measured the nanoscale temperature increases in hexagonal grains of graphene grown by CVD using a technique called Joule Expansion Microscopy (SJEM) - a thermometry technique that works using an atomic force microscope (AFM). The tested graphene transistor was coated with a layer of polymer that expands upon transistor heating, measuring graphene’s expansion and converting the expansion into temperature increase by careful calculations.

A joint research team of Korean scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) and Hungarian scientists from the Center of Natural Sciences developed a new way of producing graphene nanoribbons, to be used as a semiconductor element. The graphene nanoribbon is between 2 to 10 nm in size with edge frame form that can be controlled at room temperature. Its production was achieved by using a technology called scanning tunneling lithography (STL), where the scientists succeeded in cutting the shape of the nanoribbon edge as they wished.

In addition, the research team discovered a phase transition phenomenon changing the graphene nanoribbon either to semiconductor or metal depending on increase or decrease in their width, which raised the possibility for its commercialization.