Can a cell phone be woven into your saree or shirt? Can plastics be mixed with glass? Can the speed of computing be increased a hundredfold? Can the three billion chemical bases in our genetic map be decoded in a matter of days? Yes, all these and more are possible not in any science fiction story but in real life sooner than we would imagine, thanks to a new material called graphene. It is a new type of carbonbased material, surprisingly discovered from graphite found in ordinary pencils.

   It is the latest surprise from carbon, the basis of all life on Earth. Two researchers in the University of Manchester (U.K.), Professor Andre Geim and his colleague, Konstantin Novoselov, who was his PhD student literally ‘pulled’ out a single layer of graphene from graphite using an adhesive tape. That was in 2004. A few years later the importance of graphene was realised and the discoverers were awarded the Nobel Prize in....