Super-strong, super-light, durable-yet-flexible two-dimensional material graphene is often hailed as the wonder material of the future. Able to conduct both heat and electricity with great efficiency, its potential for use in electronics manufacturing is enormous -- OLEDs, batteries, transistors and photovoltaic cells are just a few in a long list of ways in which the material may be used.
As you can probably imagine, combining this with 3D printing is sort of a manufacturing holy grail. Last year, it was achieved for the first time by a team of researchers in Korea, who managed to 3D print graphene nanowires.
Now a team of researchers from the Imperial College London, the University of Warwick, has created a graphene 3D printing material that they have printed into more complex three-dimensional geometric arrangements.
Contact lenses sharpen our blurry vision, and free us from the hassle of pushing sliding glasses back up our noses. But the future of contacts is nigh: Researchers have created a super-thin infrared sensor that could lead to the development of night vision contact lenses.
Night vision, presently, is a rather clunky technology — epitomized in the rainy Tyrannosaurus rex scene in the original Jurassic Park. To see in the dark, a person dons a set of binocular-shaped goggles strapped to the head. The devices also produce a lot of heat, so they need to be cooled, adding to the overall volume of mechanics required.
Now, researchers from the University of Michigan are close to packing night vision’s clumsiness into technology that fits on your fingertip. They built a super-thin infrared light sensor using graphene — a material that’s a single carbon atom in thickness — that could be stacked on contact lenses or integrated into smart phone cameras for handy night vision.
