Graphene commercialization hype (Rice/UT Austin/Manchester)

So we see today an interest in private money supporting research because someone is looking for the magic stone, the elixir that's going to create a world-beating new technology in material science. The problem with that, as Tom points out, is anything that has the possibility of being different and can be promoted as being different from some thread of scientific principle becomes a cause célèbre and a focus. One of the ones that I've been involved with quite recently at a fairly high level is graphene. It's the current manifestation of the fact that people who don't know anything have finally discovered that the carbon-carbon bond is really as strong as the carbon-carbon bond is. There's still a significant amount of interest in pursuing graphene opportunities. Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin are probably the two largest focuses for technical efforts in the field today in the US, and in Britain it's Manchester University. That's where you go if you want to see who's got the most current view of graphene.