Flying Frogs and Nobel Prizes

I love Nobel Prize week -- it's like the World Series of Science. Every day this week (plus next Monday) the Nobel Foundation announces this year's winners in each of the six categories: Physiology/Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and (tacked on in 1968) Economics.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work with graphene. But Geim is already the winner of a major prize... anIG-Nobel Prize, in 2000. The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that "first make people laugh -- and then make them think." His Ig-Nobel-worthy research involved levitating frogs (Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons) using nothing more than magnets:

This is utterly harmless to the frog (and, fascinatingly, there's no reason it shouldn't work for humans...) It's based on the concept of diamagnetic levitation -- aka, "maglev" -- and is the operating principle behind maglev trains.

Of course, his Nobel prize wasn't for levitating frogs... it was for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene," seen at right. Graphene is simply a two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms -- essentially a sheet of chicken wire that's just one atom thick.

People had known about graphene for years, but one of Geim's great achievements was figuring out how to actually make it, so it could be studied. His production technique has to be one of the most low-tech methods to ever win someone a Nobel Prize -- it involved pencil lead ("graphite"), Scotch tape... and that's all. In fact, his prize-winning graphene was literally fished from the trash. Says Geim:

"We had been trying several other methods [of isolating graphene] in our lab. And there was a senior researcher who was preparing samples of graphite (bulk carbon samples) for the attempts. The way you clean graphite is just cover it with tape and pull the tape off, and then throw it away. So once, I just picked it up out of the trash and we analyzed it."

Bingo. Graphene galore. (Video of the technique here. I'm picturing slow, wonky tuba/accordion music playing in the background...)

So, what makes graphene so great? Well, for starters, it's the thinnest material in the world... as you might have expected, since it's only an atom thick. It's also the strongest material ever tested, (much like 3D lattices of carbon -- ie, diamonds -- are the hardest). According to two Columbia University researchers (Kysar and Hone), if a sheet of graphene were stretched over a coffee cup, it could withstand the poke of a pencil point that's pushing down with weight of a truck. If you could balance a truck on a pencil, of course.

Another of its physical properties is especially interesting to scientists -- it's the best conductor of electricity at room temperature that we've ever found. This makes it attractive to developers of transistors and computer chips as a potential replacement for silicon in the next generation of ultra-fast computer hardware. Plus, it's practically transparent, making it a good candidate for use in strong-but-flexible touchscreens.


So, back to Nobel Prize week. Today, in Physics, it was the popularizer of graphene (and levitator of frogs). Yesterday in Medicine, it was the inventor of in-vitro fertilization. Tomorrow, in Chemistry... will it be Whitesides or Lieber, with Team Nanotech? Brown, with his unstoppable DNA Microarray? Will the Japanese team take the gold with their organometallic sponges? Tune in tomorrow (atnobelprize.org) for the results of this winner-take-all showdown!!!