After the ages of fire, agriculture, industry and digital comes nano!   We believe that nano technology has extraordinary potential to change the world.  Deep carbon sciences's superstar material may well be graphene for quite some time.  Like ultra-functional lego blocks for material scientists, chemists, physicists and renewable energy pioneers - nano and carbon science will drive discoveries undrempt in common hours.  Thoreau would be proud!

Whether in it's current  formats or yet to be designed and delivered functional or hybrid states, graphene is just on the nano launching pad.  Get ready for an amazing ride.
                 Bob G's  "Green Cookie Dough"  Blog expands on the 5th Age...

Nanotechnology is perhaps today’s most advanced manufacturing technology. It is so rapidly emerging that most thought leaders and scientists working on this field predict that nano will change our world in the next 100 years more than all the changes that we have seen in the last half of a millennium. Nanotechnology is the design, characterization, production, and application of structures, devices and systems by controlling the shape and size at the nanometer scale. Since at nanoscale, the properties of materials differ in fundamental and valuable ways from the properties of individual atoms and molecules or bulk matter, nanotechnology has a wide-range of applications in numerous fields such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, materials, polymers, chemical and petroleum industry.                             
                                                                                                                                      Ripi

What fortunate timing - for the Nobel Prize in Physics this October to be awarded to two Manchester scientists -  receiving world renown and acclaim for their discovery (back in 2004) of the 2-dimensional super material know as graphene.  Even more now, waves of research papers and articles continue to surface claiming phenomenal properties and potential applications across a myriad of commercial, industrial and even utility sectors.  And what scientist wouldn't be excited to delve into a material showing strength beyond steel, durability exceeding diamonds, heat conductivity far past copper and electron mobility a league above silicon.  Add to that a quantum-like power to transfer these properties into common host materials, vaulting it's value potential back up into the real world and our environment.  What a grand recipe to help solve big problems for mankind! 

Maybe just in time for us all.

The Oct. 2010 Wired article linked to on the left mentions a roster of potential apps such as:  super-small transistors, super-dense data storage, energy storage and optics for solar cells and touchscreens.  Obviously a Digital age perspective.  But why not take a step back on the timeline where more  conventional businesses can get excited about the host of Industrial applications of graphene including: lubricants, ceramics, composites, plastics, surface coats, alloy metals, batteries and filtration.  One could take it all the way  back to the cave and camp fire and apply graphene to make better shelter and use of energy.  Improving construction materials, cements, packing materials and combustion processes, to name a few, are all on the table.  As good as the Wired article is, it fails to point out the myriad of arguably unglamorous but huge, bulk applications that will open up as affordable, high-scale graphene takes the scene.