63. SILICENE-

♤ Silicene is the thinnest possible form of silicon, and if the material can be commercialised, it could mean even smaller electronics. It is the silicon equivalent of graphene, the two-dimensional carbon lattice that has gripped the world of materials science since it was isolated in 2004.

♤ Graphene has a long list of astonishing properties: it has better intrinsic electron mobility than silicon, is so strong you can actually pick up a sheet of single atoms, and has a current density more than a million times that of copper, at room temperature.