Small science yields big growth

摘要

Carbon-nanomaterial researchers had plenty to celebrate this autumn. In October, Rice University in Houston, Texas, threw a gala to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of the football-shaped carbon molecule buck-minsterfullerene by Rice researchers. Physicist Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, UK, had planned to attend, but his plans gotrnderailed after he and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov won the Nobel Prize in Physics the week before the gala for their work on graph-ene, the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon that they produced in 2004 by peeling off layers of graphite with adhesive tape. It was a busy week for nanomaterials innovators.