OT: New formulation for concrete.

[Leo Ridens]

I'm confused.... 🤔

Now, we might know. Rice University researchers have successfully used a commercial laser to transform the surface carbon in foods–like toast, coconuts shells, potatoes, and Girl Scout cookies–into graphene. Without using any special vacuums or clean rooms, graphene can be patterned into an impossibly thin, edible circuit–including fuel cells to store power, radio hardware to transmit data, glowing elements to light up, and even all sorts of sensors, too. These circuits resemble a dark, inky tattoo, a bit like very burnt toast.

HA! I know Jim Tour, the Rice professor in the video. A number of years ago he published a paper showing that you can use almost any carbon source to grow high quality graphene on a copper foil (the standard technique at the time, and still widely used). Among the carbon sources he used were Girl Scout cookies, insect parts, and best of all, dog feces.

My postdoc and I (the same postdoc mentioned above who reviewed the Cu nanotube paper with the hilarious abbreviation) decided to have some fun. We wrote a "scholarly" comment in pompous "high tech" style claiming that we showed that the process was reversible. We used scientific jargon: "A 30 kg mixed-breed male canine, hereafter referred to as "Reactor", was fed Cu strips with monolayer graphene...." We included a photo of my dog, a photo of the Cu strips with graphene, and a photo of dog feces of about the same size as the Cu strips, and claimed that this proved the reversibility of the process. I showed the "manuscript" to Jim at a scientific meeting, and said we could submit it to the Journal of Irreproducible Results and get him a nomination for an IgNobel Prize. He read our "manuscript" and said it was hilarious but did not want us to go any further. My former postdoc, now a rising physics star at a Big 10 school, has the "manuscript" hanging in his lab. It is too bad we could not take it further.

FWIW, Andre Geim (a Russian expat now a professor at Manchester U in England and winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene), whom I have known for many years, is proud to proclaim that he is the only person to have won both a Nobel and an IgNobel prize. His IgNobel was awarded for levitating a small frog in a large magnetic field, using the iron in the frog's hemoglobin as the magnetic material. Andre has quite a sense of humor. He told me once over lunch that he would often get requests for autographed photos, so he would dutifully send them with "Best wishes, Andre Geim". He found some of them on eBay for ~ $50, so he started sending them instead with the inscription "Bugger Off, Andre Geim". I replied, " Andre, you do not understand Capitalism. How much are those going for on eBay?" A quick check on his phone showed those going for ~$150.

As I said in my post above about Cu nanotubes, we find humor in physics wherever we can.