Cambridge Nanosystems, a Cambridge University spin-off company, is building a vast new factory that can reportedly make up to five yearly tonnes of graphene. This might mean that graphene will be available to scientists in large quantities, which may hopefully speed up research breakthroughs. The factory is being built with the help of a £500,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board and is due to open in 2015.

Cambridge Nanosystems aims to further graphene commercialization, and have devised a method of making the material in large volumes, without degrading its quality. The company uses a patented plasma system to turn biogas into graphene. The gas itself can be natural gas (like the one that is used in housholds) or even waste gas.

Applied Graphene Materials, the British company which was admitted in the AIM in 2013, secures funding from Innovate UK for two graphene-related researches.

The company will team up with DuPont Teijin Films to explore the use and dispersion of graphene within polyester films, and also work with PolyPhotonix and CPI to work towards the development of graphene-based transparent electrodes.

The British government has given the go-ahead to a new £235m science research center called the Sir Henry Royce Institue for Advanced Materials Research and Innovation in Manchester, which will also have satellite branches in Leeds, Liverpool, London, Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield.

The center will investigate the rapidly growing field of materials science across a range of disciplines including engineering, nanotechnology and chemistry. It is meant to complement the soon-to-be-opened National Graphene Institute (NGI), as well as the planned £60m Graphene Engineering Innovation Center (GEIC).

Nokia has recently issued what could be a truly revolutional patent: a self-charging graphene-based photon battery, capable of being printed on flexible substrates.

The patent describes a battery that can regenerate itself immediately after discharge through continuous chemical reactions, without an external energy input. The result is an energy autonomous device. The battery uses humid air for the purpose of recharging and be made highly transparent.

The UK's National Graphene Institute (NGI), to be opened in March 2015, teams up with yet another company, Morgan Advanced Materials, to become project partners and collaborate in graphene research. The partnership with Morgan Advanced Materials is meant to improve the prospects of pushing forward graphene commercial use. 

This agreement follows last month's similar agreement between the NGI and 2-DTech. Both 2-DTech and Morgan Advanced Materials joined 30 other partners currently working on graphene research and commercialization projects with the University of Manchester. 

The CEI (Central European Initiative, a regional intergovernmental forum committed to supporting European integration through cooperation) has approved the GRAPHSENS project, meant to develop new graphene-based sensors for the detection of various environmental pollutants.

The project will be carried out as a cooperation between Italian and Serbian researchers, utilizing the materials know-how of the Laboratory for Nanostructure Epitaxy and Spintronics on Silicon (L-NESS) in Como, Italy and the Serbian University of Novi Sad's experience with environmental sensors.

Lomiko Metals, the Canadian company focused on the exploration and development of minerals with aims towards a new green economy, announced signing an agreement to invest in a new graphene-related venture called Graphene Energy Storage Devices (Graphene ESD) which is a U.S Corporation.

Graphene ESD Corp. has been formed with intentions to commercialize their energy storage technology, as Lomiko recently reported a successful conclusion to phase I of its Graphene Supercapacitor Project with Graphene Laboratories and Stony Brook University. 

Researchers from the Functional Materials research unit at the National Research Council of Italy in Bologna discovered an effective way of producing graphene-polymer composites by using an already-familiar industrial dye as a replacement to the traditional harmful solvents.

Different solvents and soaps that are nowadays used for graphene production might be appropriate for basic research, but are problematic for large-scale industrial applications. The tested industrial dye, already in wide use in polymer manufacturing, removes some of these problems by being non-toxic and eliminating the need to extract it at the end of the process.

Researchers from Northwestern University are working on a new type of graphene-enhanced dielectric for semiconductors. A dielectric is an insulating layer that stabilizes the charge carriers in semiconductors, aiming to decrease the voltage that a transistor needs to function and make it more efficient.

Silicon dioxide is usually used as dielectric in semiconductors, but as electronics become smaller the SiO2 becomes thinner and less effective. The researchers aim to solve that problem by creating a dielectric with a greater ability to store charges, by developing a self-assembled nanodielectric (SAND) that is made up of layers of crosslinked organosilane molecules. The SAND works well with both organic and inorganic semiconductors and functions at a lower voltage than traditional dielectrics. That, plus the fact that they can be printed onto plastic surfaces, makes them especially suited for use in a variety of devices.

Scientists from Oregon State University (in collaboration with the Argonne National Laboratory, the University of South Florida and the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Oregon) discovered an innovative way of taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and using it to make a high-value material for use in energy storage products.

The scientists developed a chemical reaction which uses carbon dioxide and results in nanoporous graphene, with an enormous specific surface area. The researchers say this method is fast and low-cost, and the result exhibits great conductivity and density. These traits make it especially suited for use in supercapacitors, even at commercial levels.