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Comment by jakedata

5 hours ago

There are two distinct use cases spelled out in this article. Electronic and photonic technology incorporating graphene to improve performance and efficiency and "we added graphene to stuff". Graphene cement, graphene carbon fibre - 3000 tons of graphene expected from one company in 2026.

Try not to breathe any, studies are still pending but that stuff gets everywhere.

>Try not to breathe any, studies are still pending but that stuff gets everywhere.

I would understand such comment in the context of carbon nanotubes or fullerenes, but graphene? Have you forgot that graphite is literally a bunch of stacked graphene?

Considering how much graphite pencils are used across the world, we would've seen hypothetical negative effects already with a high degree of confidence.

Yes, graphene production aims to produce larger sheets, but it only makes graphene less biologically active, not more.

100 years ago, asbestos was the new wonder material, and "We added asbestos to stuff" was a very common marketing bullet point for building materials. It found its way into flooring, mastic, the predecessors to drywall, ceiling texture, insulation, and anything and everything used near a combustion appliance.

Literally just, take a process that used to use sand or horsehair or whatever filler, and add a significant portion by mass of asbestos powder instead.

  • I wonder if there are studies on the lives saved by asbestos's fireproofing feature vs. cost by its lung-disease-causing feature.

    Answering my own question: the WHO estimates it costs 200K lives per year. No estimates on the other side, but that's a big number to overcome...

    https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/asbestos

    • I’m not sure if it’s still the case but I searched of alibaba once and found huge rolls of asbestos for sale and massive supply capacity numbers. It was pretty shocking.

      2 replies →

"Lets remove carbon from the atmosphere" ... humanity proceeds to invent ways to put more carbon in the atmosphere.

  • It's weird that this morning, it was getting upvotes, but in the afternoon, it is getting downvotes. Did something happen?