Happy New Year to all that celebrate!

Conductive inks for screen printing need specific rheology. Commercial inks need polymer binders, high-boiling solvents, and >30 wt% graphene. This ink hits the same viscosity window with graphite, water, and an alkane. Three ingredients. 40 seconds of shaking. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74821-3

PEO synthesis usually starts with pyrophoric potassium reagents (cumylpotassium, potassium naphthalenide) because ROH + KOH barely forms the alkoxide you need. The equilibrium lies far left. What if you just removed the water? doi.org/10.1039/C6RA22064A

In grafting-from brushes, chains deplete monomer near the surface as they grow. Longer chains reach richer solution and grow faster -- you get broad dispersity and barely extended chains. What if the monomer gradient ran the other way? doi.org/10.1021/acs.macromol.2c00685

New from the Adamson Lab in J. Mater. Chem. A! This hydrogel generates electricity from humidity. No solar. No wind. No batteries. Just moisture in the air. 0.78 V sustained for over 120 hours. Four of them power a calculator. doi.org/10.1039/D5TA...

New from the Adamson Lab in Journal of Membrane Science! Two wires on a membrane. Push salt water through at 5 V. pH hits 10.4, gas bubbles form. No counter-electrode. The membrane runs electrochemistry by itself. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

hBN is graphene's electrically insulating cousin. Like graphene, we found that it exfoliates at an oil-water interface and stabilizes high internal phase emulsions (HIPEs). What do you get if you polymerize the oil phase around it? doi.org/10.1021/acsami.4c16149

In 1911, over a million women marched for the right to work and vote. 115 years later, 15 women have carried this lab's research forward - today, 4 of our 8 members are women. Every bond in this lattice is load-bearing. So are they. Happy International Women's Day 💜🔬

Getting graphene out of a graphite emulsion is the hard part. We remembered back to our original paper: graphene spontaneously climbs wet glass vial walls. That became the separation strategy. doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.1c00917

Graphene is hydrophobic, so shaking it with oil and water makes a water-in-oil emulsion. Polymerize the oil phase and you get a conductive foam. That's the normal outcome of our graphene exfoliation method. Add tannic acid and the emulsion inverts completely. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Prior work sonicated after intercalation in graphene oxide synthesis - no conclusion. We sonicated during intercalation: ultrasound slows oxidation. 30% stronger composites, 2.6× better electrochemical sensing. Liyanage et al. (UConn), Carbon 2024 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...