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This jacket is so hi-tech even the manufacturers don't know what it does.
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There may be components of things we already use that incorporate it, or other materials used that are similar. But there haven't been any graphene watches or graphene duct tape yet. (I see something about a graphene light bulb from 2015?)
If you're not sure what graphene is, I should let someone with more authority impress upon you the hyperboles it bestows.
Sure stainless steel was a big deal. And synthetic plastics a triumph of man over nature (and may end up marking our place in the geological record). But graphene is all of those, and more.
It's everything-proof, anti-everything, and superconductive, whatever that means. It weighs less and holds more than anything else there is. It has made a new class of materials by subtracting a dimension from the entire arc of both human and nature's history, for it is, for all intents and purposes, a two-dimensional material.
And the greatest part is that it's not some crazy-long molecule with an unspellcheckable name, it's a bunch of carbon atoms. The same carbon atoms that have been floating around for eternity. By themselves, they usually make either graphene or diamonds, both just clumps of carbon atoms. But now, scientists have managed to trick them into planar arrangements only one atom thick.
Because we do not have experience with two-dimensional materials (because they do not exist anywhere else in the universe), we don't know what they can do, and we're pretty surprised by everything they've done so far.
After many years of development, the first thing we see is not a graphene/carbon nanotube powered-car by Tesla, or a graphene water filter by Brita, but a jacket by a high-end sports apparel manufacturer.
They don't even know why they did it*; the point is for consumers to wear it and discover what it does for them, for all of us. More of this to come, surely.
*I think we all know why they did it (publicity).
Notes:
Graphene Jacket. Part jacket. Part science experiment. Made with the only material in the world with a Nobel Prize
Aug 2018, Vollebak
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