Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new graphene-based earphone-sized speaker - that can actually outperform the best earphones. They say that even with almost no specialized acoustic design, it performs comparably to a high quality commercial headsets (a Sennheiser MX-400 earphone, in fact)

This speaker uses a diaphragm that is made from a multi-layer graphene sheet. The graphene is sandwiched between two electrodes that create a field that oscillates, causing the graphene to vibrate. The performance is so good because graphene is inherently very thin and strong, and it can be configured to have very small effective spring constant - it's the perfect diaphragm material.

Manchester's City Council, MIDAS, the University of Manchester and the ERDF (who just funded £23 million towards the National graphene Institute in Manchester ) funded and published a new short film that presents graphene, its discovery in Manchester and its possible applications:

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have managed to create water that is corrosive enough to etch diamonds. This was discovered by mistake - the researchers attached a layer of graphene on diamond, and then heated it to a high temperature (to encourage bonding). Water molecules that were trapped between the diamond and graphene could not escape (because graphene is impermeable ).

The "trapped", heated water transformed into a supercritical phase that behaves differently compared to "normal" water. It even corroded the diamond.

Update: the fund raising was successfully concluded, Graphene Nanochem raised $50 million and is now a public company

Biofutures (a publicly-traded UK company) is going to focus on low-cost graphene production. It will change its name to Graphene Nanochem. Biofutures raised money at the UK AIM stock exchange and the market capitalisation is £162 million, but was suspended from trade in December 2012.

Graphene Nanochem holds the exclusive license to a process known as Catalyx which uses a catalyst to extract graphene from biogases (such as methane). This process can potentially mean low-cost graphene production.

Back in February 2012 the UK government announced a £50 million graphene drive, which included £38 million for the national graphene institute (NGI) at the University of Manchester. This world-class facility is set to open in 2015, and today we hear that European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) awarded £23 million towards the NGI, in one of their largest awards ever.

Manchester University also has interest in two graphene companies, 2-DTech (wholly owned) and Graphene Industries.

Researchers from Japan's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) and the University of Southampton in the UK have developed a new way to fabricate ultra-fine graphene nanodevices using helium-ion microscopy. Usually this tool is used for sub-nanometer probing and high-resolution imaging, but this time they have used to it to selectively sputter graphene to create intricate nanoscale designs.

The researchers used their new technique to develop two devices: ultrathin suspended graphene nanoribbons for extremely sensitive gas molecular sensors and densely integrated graphene Quantum Dots for quantum information processing technologies.

Almost 70 years ago, the Atomic Collapse (a quantum mechanical phenomenon) was predicated. Using graphene, researchers from Berkeley Lab and the University of California have imaged the theorized sates and showed that they occur around super-large atomic nuclei.

Graphene made it possible to view because of the extraordinary relativistic nature of electrons in graphene that yields a much smaller nuclear charge threshold for creating the special supercritical nuclei that will exhibit atomic collapse behavior. This is not just a a confirmation of basic relativistic quantum mechanics predictions - the researchers say this result is highly relevant for future devices.

Researcherrs from the University of California (UC Riverside) have finally (after almost a century of research) managed to find out what causes the low-frequency electronic 1/f noise (also known as pink noise or flicker noise). Using graphene sheets, it was found that 1/f noise is a surface phenomenon that shows up in situations that are thinner than 2.5 nm (at least for graphene).

Graphene was essential for this work because you can test for 1/f noise using a single sheet, and then add sheet after sheet (basically adding just one-atom to the thickness of the conductive material). This cannot be done with metal films.

PlanarTech announced today that UK's 2-DTech (a subsidiary of the University of Manchester) has ordered an enhanced planarGROW-4S CVD system. The system, which was ordered in Q3 2012 and delivered in Q4 2012 will be used to produce high quality graphene for researchers at the University of Manchester.

The planarGROW-4S system has been enhanced to include a 3-zone 1,400C high-temperature furnace and an Oerlikon turbopump for ultra-high vacuum operation.