Lead ONTO your pencil: Bill Gates pours cash into graphene condoms A graphene condom so thin that blokes won’t look for excuses to avoid using it is on its way, thanks to Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $100,000 to University of Manchester boffins who’ve proposed making condoms built using the wonder-material, so far earmarked for use in electronics and computing …
I've heard people saying $10,000 per ounce. Seeing as it's 0.77mg/m^2 that's about $1100/acre, or about the same price as copier paper from Rymans.
Now getting big enough sheets of the stuff to make into johnnies, that's the tricky bit - but by that point it should be cheaper than copier paper ;-)
Useful fact of the day - it absorbs ~2.3% of the light that goes through it, quite a lot for something so...thin!
It is so expensive precisely because nobody really knows what to do with it. Most new materials undergo the same process where somebody finally figures out a practical use for it and the price continues to drop precipitously as more people get on board with it.
When we first started doing large carbon fiber molding jobs about eight years ago the raw mat and cloth was still unbelievably expensive. Now the material is everywhere and you can buy enormous quantities without causing a global price spike. Same with aluminum, used to be the most valuable metal on the planet. When they covered the capstone of the Washington Monument in DC with aluminum it was considered pure decadence and ostentatious in the extreme. Now you can buy a couple of tons a week on a working mans wages.
The driving force in bringing materials prices down isn't what most people think, it's fashion that's responsible. Titanium is probably the best, generally familiar, example. Titanium and it's alloys aren't a good choice for most things where you find it. It's extremely prone to galling, it bends fairly easily and costs a fortune to cast. It's usually not the correct choice from a materials perspective, but its been marketed to the consumer as a superior material and people demand it. The excess consumers are paying for an inferior material is used by manufacturers to drive down production costs and increase margins further. It's good stuff for people like me who buy the material in quantity.
What graphene needs to succeed is a place on the fashion scene. An Oakley type marketing entity to make it popular with the expendable income crowd. Not a big scientific or military use (those drive prices up) but a popular application that's accessible to a large market. I don't think that popular application is going to be on somebody's willy...
The risk with the material is they've skipped over all the steps that make a material feasible for use at scale and shot ahead into IP. I can order fissile material and have it shipped to me, along with a research and experiment kit but graphene doesn't even have that yet. It isn't really anything at this point. There's a very real risk that IP licensing crap will price the material forever beyond the means of the consumer and therefore quickly out of circulation. Another good idea strangled in its crib by people vying to dominate a secondary market. It's really risky and very stupid.
Don Jefe (translation the Chief of the bosses)
You blow hard but not accurately.
Your assessment of TiAl alloys is not too far off the mark.
Pure Ti or some of the higher performance alloys is both strong, heat resistant and corrosion resistant all this while being lighter and stronger then steel.
I get some sad little girl begging for either money or orthopedic shoes. I can't tell.
I don't block ads on El Reg though. They've got to have solid metrics to sell advertisers space so we can enjoy the content they provide. I block on most other sites, but I figure doing what I can to help out a primary source of my news for nearly 10 years isn't too much of an ask...
Condoms have an incredibly wide size variance across the globe. I'm not just talking about those giant size hydrant covers either. Lots of work has gone into determining the 'best' size for each region of the planet, I'll be impressed if a single size of graphene condom can actually cope with the variance.
I only know about the massive size variance because the marketing firm for a company I used to work for also managed the brands of 60 some odd brands of condoms. They had a campaign room setup in their offices and every available surface had condoms and condom wrappers attached. Just so many condoms. Anyway, the logos and tag lines on the wrappers are wrapper specific in order to retain 'optimal appearance' to minimize the effects of the imprint of the condom ring telegraphing through and distorting the logo. They spent weeks trying to define a universal size for each brand to reduce packaging costs.
So that's my condom story. You're welcome.
There's a joke from the Second World War. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were having a meeting. Churchill asks Stalin if there's anything he can do to improve his troop's moral. Stalin says yes, they need more condoms. Churchill says how many, and what size. One million, and the standard size for the Russian army, 12 inches he is told. Somewhat embarrassed by this he talks to Roosevelt afterwards and asks him what he should do. "Stamp them as medium and send them" he is told.
I agree that Sodomy won't stop STD's but it will slow down an ever increasing population that no one can take care of. Which I presumed was the major reason for the condoms.
I don't believe for a moment that anyone will manage to make those people use the condoms anyway.
According to sci-fi author Joe Haldeman, but Dallas Barr never actually advertised the product. Come to think, he didn't mention using it either... mind you, his girlfriend had had a hysterectomy, and they had both been cleaned up at the Stileman hospital. She was a Mafia nun... in my opinion, more people should read Haldeman...
Makes sense, pyrolytic graphite is a really good thermal conductor.
It is also a fairly good electrical conductor.
The main issues with using graphene are that being carbon based it might leave residue, but in all likelihood this would be less of an issue than even latex condoms.
Plus you can "recycle" the used ones as supercapacitors once cleaned and sterilised.
Electrically conductive condoms - wow!
I thought that graphene, being a monoatomic sheet of carbon was a net made up largely of hexagonal holes; is this what one wants in a condom?
(OK, I know - spermatozoa are rather large compared to the inter atomic distances of atoms in graphite/ene, but it was just a thought. If you're trying to persuade people to use graphene condoms, you have to counter the idea those people might have that you're just selling them net curtains.)
Raincoat, obviously (Thai slang for a condom!)
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