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Comment by jansan | Hacker News Reader

I hope they will not find any nasty properties like they did with asbestos. Is it known what happens if you cut graphene and the dust gets into your lungs?

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We’ve already run that experiment on millions of schoolchildren. It turns out pencils are safe. And even safer without the wood around them — those are stabby bits. The graphene layers that make up graphite seem to be pretty harmless.

Aren't graphite and graphene different structurally?

From the article: "Graphite, the common form of crystalline carbon (the rarer one being diamond) is, in essence, a lot of layers of graphene piled on top of one another." So when you write by rubbing graphite on paper you leave behind graphene on paper.

Makes sense. Although I would be surprised if pure carbon, of all elements, had a negative effect on our ability to live ROFL.

Drinking too much water can cause a fatal electrolyte imbalance in your blood. Breathing too pure of oxygen will seriously, perhaps fatally, damage your lungs. Many metals are simultaneously important in trace amounts and debilitating or fatal in larger (albeit still small) quantities.

That's just for things that you are supposed to do, only too much of. Graphene is not useful or an important part of your body's functions; doing things you aren't even supposed to be doing with it (breathing it in, for example) can only have a negative effect.

Speaking of pure carbon, carbon nanotubes are known to cause lung tumors.

Graphene is a single or very few layers of Graphite

We can get graphene by literally peeling it off graphite using a scotch tape.

> That's where Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov came in. They took a hunk of graphite and used Scotch tape to peel off layer after layer after layer. Geim and Novoselov then analyzed what they had left, and found graphene. For their discovery – which was published in 2004 – they were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

https://science.osti.gov/Science-Features/News-Archive/Featu...

Well there’s always pneumoconiosis… I’m not sure schoolchildren are cutting concrete mixed with graphene in industrial settings. Probably should take appropriate precautions.

There is a difference between a solid rod of something that tends to end up in someone’s mouth in the worst case scenario and small particles of the same thing that can end up in lungs.

Asbestos is just a silicate, which is also not harmful in many cases, including almost anything made of glass. The problem is the physical form, not the chemical composition or the atomic-scale structure.

Not to say that graphene is carcinogenic; I don’t know the literature. But it probably should not be dismissed out of hand purely because graphite is common.

But small particles surely do end up in the lungs when you're writing with a pencil, right? Certainly when you're drawing with one. Less than 100% of the graphene ends up on the paper ...

Small particles of everything end up in our lungs, the question is whether they remain there, as opposed to break down or get decomposed, and whether they cause any harm. Dose is important as well.

The solid rod of the pencil is graphite, not graphene. You can make a bit of graphene from the graphite by using sticky tape, I read. I'm not sure how much graphene "pollution" would appear spontaneously when using a pencil in a normal way.

Have you never used a pencil sharpener before? Never smelled the sweet aroma of sawdust and shaved graphite? You break it up on purpose, that has to release some graphene sheets.

The parent's point was that graphene was harmless because graphite is widely used. Graphite is just a lot of graphene layers stacked on top of each other. Pretty much no dangerous particles are emitted during normal use of a pencil, which was part of the point.

Form matters. Asbestos doesn't pose any real risk as long as it's whole and not dust (either from mining or from breakdown of asbestos products).

Small particles of ANYTHING entering the lungs isn't exactly healthy.

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