Manchester-based Graphene Lighting has announced the commencing of its new wholly owned mass production facility in Shenzen, China.

The Company shared that its previous plans of merging with JTX ended in October 2017, and it will focus its efforts towards sales and marketing using its own and partner capabilities. Graphene Lighting also said that the manufacturing facility has been in pilot production for the last 6 months and has commenced product shipment over the last four weeks.

Researchers from the University of Exeter have developed a new technique that could create a highly sensitive graphene biosensor with the capability to detect molecules of the most common lung cancer biomarkers.

The new biosensor design could revolutionize existing electronic nose (e-nose) devices, that identify specific components of a specific vapor mixture—like a person's breath—and analyze its chemical make-up to identify the cause.

First Graphene has announced a project with Steel Blue to develop graphene-enhanced safety boot components. Steel Blue is one of Australia’s leading suppliers of safety work boots.

First Graphene and Steel Blue have begun jointly working on incorporating graphene into existing and new materials of Steel Blue footwear to enhance performance and provide wearers with the latest in advanced materials benefits in safety foot wear.

GrapheneCA has announced that its second graphene production line in Brooklyn is now fully operational. This is considered as a major milestone for the company, that marks a tenfold leap in its production power.

The control we have in manufacturing with our new production line is very impressive, said Dr Sergey Voskresensky, head of R&D at GrapheneCA’s Brooklyn-based production facility. In just 90 days, we were able to develop a much more advanced system that will enable us to meet the growing demand from a wide variety of industries with real efficiency.

Researchers from Northwestern have developed graphene-enhanced self-healing coatings on metal surface based on oil. Jiaxing Huang, professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern, explains: the unusual part is that the oil coating does not drip, sticks very well, and at the same time can rapidly heal when scratched. Such coatings can protect metal surface from highly corrosive environments.

The self-healing material was achieved by modifying an oil with lightweight hollow particles in the form of tiny graphene capsules, measuring just tens of microns in size. These capsules form a network in the oil, preventing the oil film from shrinking or dripping. However, they still allow oils to flow when a scratch breaks the network, thereby healing the damaged area. In a proof of concept demo, the researchers showed that the material is able to heal repeatedly. Even after being scratched in the exact spot for nearly 200 times in a row, it was still able to return to its former un-visibly damaged state within seconds.

Scientists have noticed many years ago that when buckyballs (soccer ball shaped carbon molecules) are thrown onto a certain type of multilayer graphene, they spontaneously assemble into single-file chains that stretched across the graphene surface. Now, researchers from Brown University have explained how the phenomenon works, and that explanation could pave the way for a new type of controlled molecular self-assembly.

BUCKYBALLS LINED UP ON A LAYERED GRAPHENE SURFACE

The Brown team shows that tiny, electrically charged crinkles in graphene sheets can interact with molecules on the surface, arranging those molecules in electric fields along the paths of the crinkles.

University of Manchester researcher, Dr Thomas Waigh, has developed a technology that may make living cells and tissues more visible during analysis through the addition of graphene oxide (GO). The use of a GO GO coating to microscopy slides was found to improve both fluorescence imaging contrast and resolution.

Dr Waigh said: My team has developed technology which uses monomolecular sheets of GO to coat microscopy slides, thereby eliminating background fluorescence and improving the resolution of images. "It’s an important breakthrough as GO is cheap and easy to manufacture in large quantities. The cost to coat each slide is estimated to be 12 pence".