
Move over Graphene? Here Comes Borophene - DamnInteresting
https://www.realclearscience.com/quick_and_clear_science/2020/07/28/move_over_graphene_here_comes_borophene.html
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caiobegotti
> Unfortunately, borophene looks to be more difficult to produce than
> graphene.

That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never
"took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with
graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and commercialized or
embedded into some market product? It's been 15 years anyways, I hope
borophene is not just graphene 2.0 in that sense.

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akiselev
_> That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene
never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual
applications with graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and
commercialized or embedded into some market product?_

It's a chicken and egg problem. No one has really bothered to put graphene
into a mass manufactured product because of supply issues and no one's got the
resources to accelerate work on the supply issue because there's no demand.
Actually using high quality graphene to e.g. improve the performance of a
capacitor or a battery cathode/anode by a few percent is really easy once you
are sure that any money invested in doing it at scale won't go to waste
because of supply issues.

Aluminum when through the same exact process in the 1800s so it's a natural
consequence of the intersection of economics and science. I've got an old
Scientific American from right after the Civil War with pages of people
talking about this new wonder material aluminum and how it will change the
world of metallurgy forever (and how useless the "machine guns" were during
the war and the repeated discovery of heat treating asphalt and a bunch of
other cool stuff). It wasn't until the Bayer and Hall–Héroult processes were
invented in 1886-8 that aluminum became cheap enough to use in every day
things. It took something like 60 years from first pure piece of aluminum for
mass manufacturing to become practical but only 30 years before it changed the
face of transportation and war.

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8note
Really this sounds like a problem of missing government intervention. The
government could treat graphene like corn until all the industries have built
up around it

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missedthecue
How about instead of building and shuttering a billion dollar chat app every 2
years google puts some resources into it in the interest of diversification.
All these tech companies are gonna need ever more batteries and Google would
be well ahead if they can make the best ones.

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anoncareer0212
Because rebranding a chat app as it evolves instead of calling it '2.0'
doesn't imply you have spare resources to _check notes_ utterly revolutionize
battery technology out of nowhere.

Google's CFO's strategy has been to incubate those ideas and either sell them
to industry or spin them off with independent investment after the, say, first
$10 billion in costs.

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missedthecue
It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs
have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to
be going for it.

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creato
Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum
computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that
effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point.
Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.

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mlthoughts2018
Ohh noo. Now all my “Graphene? More like Borophene.” jokes are obsolete.

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cwkoss
I don't get it

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waiseristy
[https://youtu.be/zaxH4xeMGzM](https://youtu.be/zaxH4xeMGzM)

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Shorel
Damn, please put a disclaimer before the link.

Some of us can't stand Adam Sandler.

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newyankee
I really wanted to see Buildings that were 4x lighter, aeroplanes 5x lighter,
solar cells > 50% efficient, Chips sped up by 5x beyond 7 nm, Solar
desalination getting 10x cheaper but i have settled for the fact that Graphene
is never going to be cheap enough to be mass produced unless by luck someone
invents a process that works.

It will be restricted to niche applications based on its cost of production at
a given point of time assuming it does provide enough benefits at that price
point.

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swiley
Aren’t most boron molecules very toxic?

