 Now, I've just mentioned the fact that each individual layer in graphite is strong for its thickness. Well, some very interesting research found that it was possible to separate out a single sheet of graphite and study its properties. And it turns out that these properties, strength and conductivity and flexibility and so on, are pretty amazing. Meaning that these single layers of graphite, which have been named graphene, are likely to form the basis for future applications such as new transistors, special coatings, sensors and support membranes to hold tiny samples in electron microscopes. Google Graphene and you'll find it all over the place. So how do you separate a single molecular sheet from a lump of graphite? Andre Geim and Konstantin Navoslov at the University of Manchester managed to do this during a series of fun Friday experiments that they were running using some highly advanced equipment, sticky tape. They pulled a thin layer of graphite off a larger lump using sticky tape and then with further bits of sticky tape they removed more and more graphite layers until they could see under a microscope that the graphite had become transparent. Perfecting this process they eventually obtained a single layer of graphite which they called graphene. This picture shows a scanning transmission electron micrograph of graphene with atomic resolution that's so good that you can see the carbon atoms do indeed form hexagons. And this picture, a scanning electron micrograph at a larger scale, here you can see a whole sheet of graphene folded like a piece of silk. For this work which has led to a massive amount of research into the properties of this material, they received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics which means that Andre Geim is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize, awarded to examples of research that quote, make you laugh and then make you think. Geim won the Ig Nobel for Physics in 2000 for his research into levitating frogs, a study of the phenomenon of magnetic repulsion between diamagnetic materials and strong magnetic fields. Anyway, apart from graphite and diamond there are still more allotropes of carbon. A number of them are versions of graphene where the single sheet has been folded around to form balls or tubes. The most famous has the same arrangement of hexagons and pentagons in its structure as a soccer ball. These molecules are colloquially known as buckyballs and bucky tubes and are formerly known as fullerines. Interestingly, both of these names come from the name of Richard Buckminster Fuller who was not a chemist, but was in fact an American architect who popularized the geodesic dome. And the people who first came up with the buckyballs realized that the structure of the buckyball was somewhat like a geodesic dome. The last allotrope and perhaps the one that's most important to all of us right now is amorphous carbon or as you might know it, coal or charcoal or soot. In this allotrope the carbon atoms are joined together rather randomly, amorphously in fact, giving no long range structure. It's black and hard but it's not particularly strong because the random arrangement of bonds means that they're not in the most stable configuration which weakens the overall structure.