Graphene-Info: the graphene experts

Researchers at Shanghai University and Shanghai General Hospital at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine have developed an electrochemical biosensor that combines a three-dimensional graphene framework with a heat-denatured casein interlayer to detect uric acid in sweat at femtomolar concentrations - a sensitivity the team says surpasses prior sweat-based uric acid sensors.

Uric acid is a key biomarker for conditions like gout, hyperuricemia, kidney dysfunction, and cardiovascular disease, and is conventionally measured through blood tests that require trained personnel and aren't suited to frequent or continuous monitoring. Sweat-based sensing offers a non-invasive alternative, but the low concentration of uric acid in sweat and the complexity of the sweat matrix have made reliable detection difficult, and conventional two-dimensional graphene sensing platforms are limited by restricted surface area for enzyme loading and slow analyte diffusion to active sites.

Researchers at Walter Sisulu University in South Africa have published a comprehensive review examining graphene-metal-organic framework (MOF) composites as electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) - the two reactions that govern performance in fuel cells, metal-air batteries, and water electrolyzers.

ORR and OER are both slow, multi-electron processes, and the catalysts that currently perform them best rely on scarce, expensive noble metals - platinum for ORR, iridium and ruthenium oxides for OER. Replacing these with earth-abundant alternatives such as iron, cobalt, and nickel-based materials is seen as essential for scaling up green hydrogen production, long-duration energy storage, and zero-emission fuel cells, and graphene-MOF hybrids have emerged as one of the more promising routes to get there. Graphene contributes high electrical conductivity, a large surface area, and structural flexibility, while MOFs bring tunable porosity, abundant active sites, and a wide range of chemical functionalities - a combination the review frames as complementary rather than simply additive.

Researchers at Rice University, together with collaborators from the University of Manchester, the University of Brighton, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the University of Sussex, and Pennsylvania State University, have shown that sub-nanometer-scale wrinkles in graphene can generate a strong electrical polarization simply by bending, without any added chemistry or dopants. The effect, known as flexoelectricity, was predicted theoretically in graphene in 2008 but had not previously been directly measured at this scale.

Flexoelectricity describes polarization induced by a strain gradient, and it can occur even in materials that would otherwise show no polarization at all. In three-dimensional materials, competing electromechanical effects tend to mask it, but atomically thin two-dimensional materials offer a cleaner setting to isolate strain-driven polarization. In principle, bending a two-dimensional sheet tightly enough can perturb the out-of-plane orbitals that carry its electrons, generating a "quantum" flexoelectric response distinct from classical charge separation across a deformed membrane. Confirming this quantum contribution experimentally has been difficult, since most prior work accessed curvatures several orders of magnitude gentler than the atomic-scale bending needed to perturb individual orbitals.

The graphene field moves fast: new production processes, new application areas, new companies entering (and sometimes leaving) the market every month. Keeping track of where the industry actually stands, beyond any single headline, is harder than ever.

That's where The Graphene Handbook comes in. Now in its 2026 Edition, it brings graphene's fundamentals, production methods, application landscape and market data together into one structured, independent reference - the kind of resource teams reach for when scoping a new project, building an R&D roadmap, briefing a client, or simply getting a new hire up to speed on the field without weeks of scattered reading.

Levidian has launched NanoFlow-S1-20, the first product in its new NanoFlow range of graphene dispersions, designed to make it faster and easier for the coatings industry to evaluate and adopt graphene in existing solvent-based formulations.

NanoFlow-S1-20 is a high-concentration coating additive containing 20 wt.% of Levidian's G3 graphene, pre-dispersed in xylene. It is designed as a drop-in solution that can be blended using standard paint mixing equipment, either into Part A of a two-part coating system or directly into a one-part formulation. The aim is to remove one of the persistent barriers to graphene adoption in coatings: incorporating high-quality graphene consistently and efficiently without formulators having to develop their own dispersion processes from scratch.

Stockholm-based Bright Day Graphene, which produces graphene material from lignin, a residual product of the forest industry, has raised €3 million in an early-stage funding round led by Oji Holdings Corporation, a major Japanese paper and pulp manufacturer. The company will use the capital to scale up its sustainable graphene production for industrial use.

Founded in Sweden in 2017, Bright Day Graphene makes high-performance graphene materials for energy storage and electronics using a proprietary process designed to reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing. The new funding will go toward scaling production capacity, expanding commercial networks across European and Asian markets, and further application testing in energy storage, coatings and advanced electronics.

Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen and Uppsala University, led by Carolin Frank together with Prof. Marika Schleberger and Prof. Daniel Primetzhofer, have experimentally observed rainbow scattering in ion transmission through single-layer graphene, a phenomenon that had previously only been predicted and simulated, never directly measured.

Rainbow scattering is a well-known effect in classical scattering theory, arising when particles following different trajectories converge onto the same characteristic angle. It appears in contexts ranging from ordinary rainbows to nuclear and crystal scattering, and it encodes detailed information about the interaction potential between a projectile and its target. Applying this to graphene had been an attractive but elusive target: capturing the effect requires both an extremely clean, defect-free single-layer graphene sample and a detector with very high angular resolution, since even minor surface contamination smears out the pattern.