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The world's first-ever hiking boots to use graphene have been unveiled by The University of Manchester and British brand inov-8.
Building on the international success of their pioneering use of graphene in trail running and fitness shoes last summer, the brand is now bringing the revolutionary technology to a market recently starved of innovation.
Just one atom thick and stronger than steel, graphene has been infused into the rubber of inov-8's new ROCLITE hiking boots, with the outsoles scientifically proven to be 50% stronger, 50% more elastic and 50% harder wearing.
How long before graphene-infused tires hit the market, too?
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World's First- Ever Graphene Hiking Boots Unveiled
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Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @08:34PM (9 children)
I'm getting the impression they just mixed small bits of imperfect graphene (torn-up sheets) into rubber. It could be a lot easier to do this than make a graphene desalination filter for example.
Also where is this stuff [wikipedia.org]?
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(Score: 5, Funny) by Immerman on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:07PM (6 children)
You may be right. And we actually already have a special name for small pieces of torn of graphene - graphite. Congratulations, they invented the pencil-sole shoe. I'm sure floor maintenance people around the world will be jubilant to hear it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:06PM (5 children)
A torn 1- or several atom thick sheet of graphene should still have some of the properties of graphene. Although maybe not if it gets wadded up and chemically bonds to itself...
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:21PM
Sure. And even low-grade graphene sections are likely to be much larger than your typical graphite flake. Chemically though, they are exactly the same thing - in fact peeling tape off of graphite blocks was one of the early ways to produce small sheets of graphene. The only difference is scale - though as the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.
(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:24PM (3 children)
Graphene is a single atom thick, anything else is graphite. [graphene-supermarket.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:35PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilayer_graphene [wikipedia.org]
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Any_ideas_on_multilayer_graphene-graphite_boundaries [researchgate.net]
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(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:43PM
Stacked single atom thickness layers, otherwise graphite [graphenea.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 20 2018, @03:08AM
I think a better description is that a sheet of graphene is literally a single extremely large molecule, with every carbon atom reachable from any other by traversing only covalent chemical bonds - and one of the strongest covalent bonds.
Graphite in contrast is typically something more like flakeboard/chipboard, made of lots of small flakes of graphene all laminated together more or less at random. That lack of internal cohesion is what robs it of most of the properties of the constituent flakes. Each flake is every bit as strong and conductive as any other piece of graphene - but all those properties stop at the edge of the flake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:22PM (1 child)
"Contains Graphene!" .. all marketing BS. One atom thick layer, somewhere inside the boot material is now going to magically make the boot SO TOUGH. Yet they will charge 10x the price. Its like adding truffle to anything makes it top-tier (see Worth-It series on youtube). Plain boring cheese pizza (worth $1), but "chef" grates 2 grams of truffle on top and "wow, the $800 pizza". Same here - a forgettable mediocre shoe is "infused" with graphene.....
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:30PM
Hopefully, a university would not participate in a graphene-based marketing lie. But you never know.
I guess it is not so easy to benchmark a shoe. Or a tennis racquet [smh.com.au].
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