Concrete may have found it's killer app in graphene supercapacitors that can power portable devices. While the performance was "only" equivalent to energy-dense but non-rechargeable lithium ion batteries, they charge faster and take about 20 minutes for 80% charge. Graphene Supercapacitors and Future Superbatteries for Energy-Efficient Power A key component of lithium ion batteries is the electrodes. While lithium ion batteries have lithium ions as the active material inside the electrode, supercapacitors have active material outside the electrode. This means that the lithium ion electrode layer is typically much thicker for lithium ion batteries than for supercapacitors. As a result, batteries have higher energy density but lower power density while supercapacitors have lower energy density but higher power density. When the power density is too high, there is a risk of the capacitor exploding. This safety concern, combined with the higher costs, have kept supercapacitors in a niche device market, along with the niche battery market of mobile phones and laptops. However, supercapacitors are poised for a comeback. While the performance of supercapacitors is currently capped by the materials used, advances in materials will make supercapacitors as good as batteries. I don't know if that will mean supercapacitors and batteries will be married as a set, so to speak, for all-purpose mobile use, but researchers are certainly making progress towards supercapacitors being competitive with batteries. I had the privilege of chatting with Nandakumar K. Menon, the Professor and Vice-Chancellor of the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, as part of his recent visit to America. The IITs are a very small handful of well-run schools that produce a remarkable proportion of the top Indian computer science graduates, engineers, and scholars. Nandakumar took over IIT Madras from Partha Pratim Chakrabarti. Menon discussed his team's work on new types of batteries based on the fast-recharging capabilities of graphene supercapacitors. I was at the IIT in 1995 when I met you and then went on to Delhi University in the early 2000s. Both of our areas of research were in nanotechnology and both very fast-growing research areas. We should have been talking today about the nanotechnology future at the IIT Delhi where our joint efforts were very successful but for the unforeseen consequences of the attacks on the Indian Science Congress in 2010. Menon went to the US in the 1990s. He was a visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara and director of the National Institute of Materials, which was a government and NSF funded R&D center that was the top lab in terms of number of papers published on materials. After becoming Vice-Chancellor of the IITs, Menon was promoted to a government committee of six members. In that capacity, he looked at how to change the system for teaching science education in India. There are 2,000+ schools of higher learning and only the 10 largest, plus two special and elite schools, get a say on the policies for science education. This has led to very local and local problems, he says. Professor Menon is a leader in the National Academy of Sciences, the highest grade of the Indian and international academies. While in the US, Menon met with a couple of Nobel Prize winners and Nobel Laureates like Steven Chu who was the US Secretary of Energy and the head of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. And former head of NASA, Charles Bolden, who joined the US Navy and retired as a Vice Admiral. Menon says that in addition to his experience with the material science and chemistry of batteries, he had a more informal life-long role of being trained as a musician and in physics. I've been trained by the best musicians of South India. My brother Ravi Kumar is a well-known mridangam player. He's in the film music world but I also performed at the All India Radio. My uncle, who is a goldsmith, told me "Nandakumar, you play the khanjira; it is very simple but it takes time." This meant that he trained me. He also told me that the khanjira was a bit like a flute. The one I used had 16 holes but you only need 14 because the one on your left is a place for the thumb to hold onto. You can see that in the videos on the site. When I started out, I played the khanjira and the tabla. Then I did the tabla solo, of course. After finishing college at Delhi University in 1977, I went to the US for my doctorate. The original plan was to work with my father-in-law, a doctor, on cancer treatments, but he died on a trip to Canada. I asked him to get me a visa and flew to the US. I lived in the small town of Albuquerque. I came across a book in a bookstore there about the famous Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. He lived in a remote part of India. The book about him gave a description of where he lived but the pictures were all of his wife and children. He died young and wasn't very famous. His family was quite well-off and I was offered a stipend to be a full professor of chemistry. I wasn't trained in chemistry but I was trained in science, thanks to my background in India. I also had good teachers. I knew Ramanujan was a mathematician and I found him with calculations but that wasn't what I was looking for. Then I found a book about Sir C.V.Raman who lived about 30 years before. He was the man who made the "fingerprints" that everyone knows about today. He was director of the Indian Institute of Science, which is in Bangalore. At the time, this was an obscure institute so I didn't bother to apply for admission. My work was with Prof. R. P. Agarwal at the Indian Institute of Technology. I had to figure out ways to measure Ramanujan's work. The result of this effort was the Indian publication of a number of papers from Prof. Raman and I did some additional work at that. But I wanted to explore chemistry, I wanted to explore mathematics and found that Ramanujan was the only good source for what I was looking for. So, I just read the books about Ramanujan, the one biography, and some of the papers. I thought he was a genius and a mathematical genius and then came the great Ramanujan myth. His last days were spent in a hospital and the only way he could communicate to everyone who came to visit was by writing in chalk on the floor. This was how he talked to people, including Ramanujan's first biographer. Ramanujan is famous but I knew much more about him than anyone I met in the United States because I knew all the books that said "don't bother, it's all been said, it's in this book, it was never written down." I got a scholarship at Harvard but that had nothing to do with Ramanujan, I was actually able to figure out how to separate water into its component parts. A lot of my Indian friends are biologists and I think that is fine because they will find different things. But Ramanujan worked with numbers and found different patterns and then developed theories. In mathematics and computer science, our best is already known in the sense that you don't go back and discover new things. The work that I did in this area will never be published again, there is nothing new there. When you are in a big lab in the US or anywhere in the world, you have to work to get your work published. But if you are a pure mathematician, as I am, you don't need a university because there is always a seminar somewhere. People know me for papers that I've published, I think, about 60 times. But I always say I don't write these for publication. I have a notebook which is where I do all my original work. And it is on that basis I publish. I've been invited to give talks all over the world, including ones in Taiwan, Japan, Europe, Africa, and the United States. I've always considered my father and mother as my real teachers. I think I came out of that background so that when I went to the US, I was free to be whatever I wanted. I was a pure physicist. I hadn't studied chemistry but I did find that I understood the periodic table better than some professors who were working in experimental labs. And if you ask me why I took this job with the US National Academy of Sciences, I think it is an honor. I mean, I would be the first Indian to be on a group that looks at what is new, what is happening and what the future will be. I also try to encourage young people in India to go to the US. I have worked on my own books but never been able to finish anything. I've published many papers and those are published in one book. I have to admit that I had this problem for a long time. I would start a book on, say, carbon nanotubes, a very complicated topic. But when I got some momentum, I didn't finish it. Sometimes I feel like a