Grad Students Turn Girl Scout Cookies Into $15 Billion Through Science!

It’s a dope day for science here on Omega Level. This is some straight up Dr. Manhattan type shit here. A bunch of grad students at Rice University have found a way of rearranging carbon atoms, turning a box of girl scout cookies into $15 billion dollars.

Do explain? Happily.

io9:

[By] rearranging some carbon atoms, a $5 box of Girl Scout cookies becomes a $15 billion hunk of industrial material. In fact, rearranging the atoms of just about any old carbon source – including a standard pencil lead – into thin sheets of carbon atoms called graphene can turn a pretty serious profit.

Graphene, which was first extracted in sheets by Nobel Laureates Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov in 2004, has received a lot of attention in recent years in light of its many potential applications in everything from solar energy harvesting to biomedicine. Consequently, the commercial rate for a two-inch square sheet of graphene is on the order of 250 dollars. For reference, the graduate students in Rice University chemist James Tour’s lab estimated that a box of shortbread cookies contains enough carbon to produce close to thirty football fields worth of graphene.

[cont]

The image…taken from the lab’s recent publication, illustrates the basic concept behind generating graphene. A solid source of carbon is placed on a sheet of copper foil. The copper and carbon source are inserted into a low pressure furnace flowing with argon and hydrogen gases at temperatures between 800 and 1050 degrees Celsius. Over the course of 15 to 20 minutes, the solid carbon source decomposes, and graphene forms on the side of the foil opposite to the original carbon source. The leftover residues remain on the original side of the copper sheet. Bingo – graphene.

So awesome. Check out a video on it right here.