Britain invests in graphene research institute

Nature : The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced that it was providing £50 million ($78 million) to open a National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester in 2015. The goal of the institute will be to convert basic research into industrial applications for grapheneâmdash;a thin, flexible honeycomb-like layer of carbon. Because of graphene’s unique properties, it could potentially be used in a wide range of electronic devices. The University of Manchester’s Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 2004 discovery of a simple way to create graphene sheets, which sparked a worldwide explosion of interest among physicists and chemists.