An awful lot of ink has been spilled about how graphene is going to basically save the world with its myriad applications and powers. But chances to actually see evidence of how and why the hexagonal lattices are so strong in a life-size way have been few and far between. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has changed that. The school's latest experiment uses graphene material that's 5% as dense as steel and ten times the metal's strength, showing what's possible when the composite is more than just a flat sheet. Starting from a highly-accurate computer model, the researchers 3D printed diatomic cubes to represent the material's sponge-like structure and then subjected them to compression tests. The shape here is incredibly important; the cube itself looks like a magenta sponge. Its porous nature means that there's more surface area, and more surface area means higher strengths at lower weights. Perhaps most interesting is that the different cubes ...
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