The Earth we inhabit struggles in an ever-tightening race between being overcome with its own trash and cleaning up after itself. Two stunning approaches to turning trash and waste into valuable materials and fuels could help us win that race. Graphene Dreams in a Flash Bigthink.com leads with the news that, “Graphene typically costs $200,000 per ton. Now, scientists can make it from trash.” This “insanely useful” product is difficult to produce, making it a luxury for many applications – until now. Graphene is insanely useful, but very difficult to produce — until now. Dr. James Tour and his Rice University students have created a way to produce graphene in large quantities in a literal flash. This technique, Flash Joule Heating, was discovered in Dr. Tour’s laboratory by graduate student Duy Luong. Also the lead author on the paper in the journal Nature, Luong “Did not expect to find graphene when he fired up the first small-scale device to find …
