The tortoise and the hare

The Tortoise and The Hare​

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There once was a speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch.
Hare ran down the road for a while and then and paused to rest. He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, "How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?"
Hare stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking, "There is plenty of time to relax."
Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until he came to the finish line.
The animals who were watching cheered so loudly for Tortoise, they woke up Hare.
Hare stretched and yawned and began to run again, but it was too late. Tortoise was over the line.
After that, Hare always reminded himself, "Don't brag about your lightning pace, for Slow and Steady won the race!"


Quiet dawning of the graphene age

The evidence is there, if you know where to look, that tyres don’t work very well. It is the streaks of rubber on slip roads, the black marks before stop signs — the piles of treadless tyres awaiting costly recycling. Not, perhaps, for much longer.
When graphene was discovered it was described as a wonder material that would revolutionise electronics and produce high-tech super-strong materials. More than a decade on Sir Andre Geim, its co-discoverer, says it could make its first impact in a rather more mundane, but arguably just as important, way: cooling tyres.
“Every day on the roads you see truck tyre marks. Tyres get hot, and they shed rubber. I made a prediction seven years ago that the first application would be in tyres,” he said. “I imagined that would be due to strong material that stopped them shedding.
“I was wrong. It turned out that when you add a few per cent of graphene it doesn’t improve strength but improves dramatically the thermal conductivity of the tyres.” So they don’t shed.
He said that people in the companies involved told him it increases their life by as much as three times. “Imagine the environmental impact? Even if it was 20-30 per cent longer it would still be worth doing.”
In 2010 Professor Geim won a Nobel Prize for his work on the atom-thick form of carbon, which is far stronger than steel, far more conductive than copper. Graphene was generally described as a “wonder material”. Afterwards, a knighthood was added to his British citizenship.
That was not all he got though. As a result of the prize he also got a big shiny £61 million institute in Manchester University, a special place in George Osborne’s strategy to win the economic “global race”, and to help build a British “graphene valley”. As far as the public was concerned, not a lot happened.
That, said Professor Geim, is the annoying thing about people. “They have this attitude, ‘We’ve paid our tax money, now show us our goodies’.” And the truth is, there haven’t been many goodies yet, when it comes to graphene.
When our ancestors found the first piece of iron, what do they think? Probably, ‘Oh I’ll make a weapon and kill my neighbour’.Sir Andre Geim
Until last week, that is, when research published by Professor Geim’s group showed that graphene could be used to sieve the salt out of seawater far more efficiently than the best filters available — potentially bringing cheap drinking water to the world’s driest regions. Suddenly graphene was back in the news again — even if desalination, and tyres, was probably not quite what Mr Osborne had in mind.
The story of graphene’s discovery has become one of those scientific fables. In the early 2000s Professor Geim and his fellow emigre Kostya Novoselov were mucking about with graphite and found they could isolate flakes an atom thick.
“Look around at the materials. All have three parameters: thickness, width and length. It’s a 3D world. Then, 15 years ago, we became aware of materials where one of those dimensions, thickness, is essentially missing,” Professor Geim said. “Generally people would be thinking, ‘Oh right, this is just an atomic plane of a bigger material’.” But it wasn’t. The whole was less than the sum of its parts.”
Professor Geim has always been far more interested in the basic science than the applications. He wants to talk about graphene LEDs, which dissipate heat more effectively, or graphene car batteries which “at a cost of pennies” improve performance by a couple of per cent. It is about marginal gains, “diffusion rather than revolution”.
Professor Geim thinks that fundamental scientific research is rarely applied in the ways people initially assumed. “Imagine the Iron Age, when our ancestors found the first piece of iron,” he said. “What do they think? Probably, ‘Oh I’ll make a weapon and kill my neighbour. That will be the biggest tech revolution’.
“What people discovered is not only is iron good for weapons, it is good for pottery, cookingware, and making shovels and axes (to kill trees not neighbours). Now we have iron everywhere.”
So this, he believes, is the early stage of a new graphene age. And it begins not with supercomputers, but tyres.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/quiet-dawning-of-the-graphene-age-zmlxjqdnf

Given Mainak's budget is closer to thrupence ha penny than the telephone numbers the guys above have had at their disposal , and what he and Ionic have achieved thus far with minimal fanfare , is Ionic a tortoise , slowly but surely bringing its technology to market around August this year?.

Raider