Just as computers in schools would have been an unfamiliar sight to your parents, the technology used by any children you may have is likely to be alien to you. Yet, surprisingly, some of the key discoveries that will allow this to happen exploit the same principles we see in plain old pencil and paper.
In the past 5 years carbon has emerged as a strong potential replacement for silicon in computers, but not in the form of the tough tetrahedral structure of diamond or the loosely bound hexagonal sheets of graphite (see CHEMISTRY REVIEW, Vol. 13, No. 4, p. 34). Instead, high-profile researchers are making names for themselves by researching the individual honeycomb-like sheets that slide off graphite pencil lead and form the marks on the paper. These single flat sheets of hexagonally linked carbons are now commonly called graphene and boast some remarkable properties (Figure 1).
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