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
Allotropes of carbon centimeters in length. There are two main types of nanotubes: single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs). Carbon nanobuds are a newly discovered allotrope of carbon in which fullerene like "buds" are covalently attached to the outer sidewalls of the carbon nanotubes. This hybrid material has useful properties of both fullerenes and carbon nanotubes. For instance, they have been found to be exceptionally good field emitters. Schwarzites are negatively curved carbon molecules. (A negatively curved object bends inwards like a saddle rather than bending outwards like a sphere.) The team that first created schwarzites did not recognize them as such.