Graphene:World`s lightest material

Graphene is a substance composed of pure carbon, with atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern similar to graphite, but in a one-atom thick sheet. It is very light, with a 1-square-meter sheet weighing only 0.77 milligrams.



It is an allotrope of carbon whose structure is a single planar sheet of sp²-bonded carbon atoms, that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. The term graphene was coined as a combination of graphite and the suffix -ene by Hanns-Peter Boehm, who described single-layer carbon foils in 1962. Graphene is most easily visualized as an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. The crystalline or "flake" form of graphite consists of many graphene sheets stacked together.
 

The carbon-carbon bond length in graphene is about 0.142 nanometers. Graphene sheets stack to form graphite with an interplanar spacing of 0.335 nm. Graphene is the basic structural element of some carbon allotropes including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. It can also be considered as an indefinitely large aromatic molecule, the limiting case of the family of flat polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
 

There is an analog of graphene composed of silicon called silicene.
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". In 2013, graphene researchers led by Prof. Jari Kinaret from Sweden's Chalmers University, secured a €1 billion grant from the European Union.

Beer Flood

The Great London Beer Flood Of 1814

                                       Unfortunately for the brewery, and everyone in the area, this time there were consequences--including grave ones. About an hour after the iron ring fell off, all hell broke loose.
First the huge vat burst, which some described as rending such a sound as to be heard five miles away, but that wasn't the end of it. The force of the vat exploding caused others around it to give way as well, unleashing something like 1.3 million gallons (5,850,000 liters) of porter.

                                      Workers indoors were too busy saving fellow employees and trying to contain the porter to worry much about what was happening outside the brewery. An enormous wave of beer, reportedly 15 feet high and weighing hundreds of tons, crashed down the street outside. The beer roared down the street and into cellars, smashed houses, and swept women and children off their feet on the first floors of the surrounding tenement houses. Those living in the cellars had first to climb onto their highest furniture to escape the flood, and then evacuate themselves before the room was totally enveloped.

 
 The manor house of Toten Hall - 1813

An anonymous American who'd been visiting the area wrote this of the ordeal:

All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand [actually 8,000 ] barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers.