$15 billion worth of Graphene from a box of cookies...

Researchers from Rice University had a meeting in which they discussed the possibility of making graphene out of sugar. Chemist James Tour said you can actually make it from any carbon source - including a girl scout cookie. So they dared him to do it - and he did, inviting a troop of Houston Girl Scouts to see how it's done:

Tour says that a 2"x2" graphene costs about $250 today - and from one box of cookies you could make a 157,800m2 graphene sheet - which will be worth over $15 billion ($15,290,697,674 to be exact...).

The graphene itself was made by carbon deposition on copper foil: putting a cookie in a furnace (1050 degrees) on a copper foil decomposes the carbon sources - the graphene forms on the opposite side of the foil while the residues are left on the original side.

Posted: Aug 04,2011 by Ron Mertens