Bulletproof vest material for use in body armor. Graphene is manufactured from carbon and is the thinnest, strongest, and most conductive material on the planet. Taking the form of hexagonally arranged atoms, its tensile strength is known to be 200 times greater than steel, but studies from Rice University have revealed it is also 10 times better than steel at dissipating energy, an ability that had previously not been thoroughly explored. To test its properties, the University of Massachusetts stacked together graphene sheets only a single carbon atom thick, creating layers ranging in thickness from 10 nanometers to 100 nanometers from 300
Atom u, and so a mole of carbon-12 atoms weighs exactly 0.012 kg. Atoms lack a well-defined outer boundary, so their dimensions are usually described in terms of an atomic radius. This is a measure of the distance out to which the electron cloud extends from the nucleus. However, this assumes the atom to exhibit a spherical shape, which is only obeyed for atoms in vacuum or free space. Atomic radii may be derived from the distances between two nuclei when the two atoms are joined in a chemical bond. The radius varies with the location of an atom on the