Graphene at 20: Still no sign of the promised space elevator, but the material is quietly changing the world

Twenty years ago this October, two physicists at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, published a groundbreaking paper on the "electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films." Their work described the extraordinary electronic properties of graphene, a crystalline form of carbon equivalent to a single layer of graphite, just one atom thick.