This article summarizes the energy savings and environmental impacts of using traditional and bio-based fiber-reinforced polymer composites in place of conventional metal-based structures in a range of applications. In addition to reviewing technical achievements in improving material properties, we quantify the environmental impacts of the materials over the complete product life cycle, from material production through use and end of life, using life-cycle assessment (LCA).

Recently, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and related techniques have brought unique insights to graphene research, demonstrating remarkable flexibility in characterizations ranging from atomic ordering to charge distribution. Such TEM studies have helped advance areas including the understanding of graphene growth and the effects of defects and dopants on the mechanical and electrical properties of graphene. Electron microscopy has proved particularly useful in determining the structure of crystals and grain boundaries across six orders of magnitude—from the shapes, arrangements, and stacking sequences of grains to the atomic arrangements at grain boundaries. Meanwhile, graphene is becoming a promising two-dimensional laboratory bench for electron microscopy, for example, turning graphene into a medium for nanosculpting by transforming buckyballs into graphene and vice versa. Finally, graphene has been used as an ultrathin support membrane for TEM, enabling studies of the motion of single atoms, direct imaging of two-dimensional amorphous materials, and even formation of nano-aquaria for imaging bacteria or nanoparticles in liquid media. Rapid developments in the fields of both electron microscopy and graphene will continue to provide a rich ground for future insights.

Graphene is a material with outstanding properties that make it an excellent candidate for advanced applications in future electronics and photonics. The potential of graphene in high-speed analog electronics is currently being explored extensively because of its high carrier mobility, its high carrier saturation velocity, and the insensitivity of its electrical-transport behavior to temperature variations. Herein, we review some of the key material and carrier-transport physics of graphene, then focus on high-frequency graphene field-effect transistors, and finally discuss graphene monolithically integrated circuits (ICs). These high-frequency graphene transistors and ICs could become essential elements in the blossoming fields of wireless communications, sensing, and imaging. After discussing graphene electronics, we describe the impressive photonic properties of graphene. Graphene interacts strongly with light over a very wide spectral range from microwaves to ultraviolet radiation. Most importantly, the light–graphene interaction can be adjusted using an electric field or chemical dopant, making graphene-based photonic devices tunable. Single-particle interband transitions lead to a universal optical absorption of about 2% per layer, whereas intraband free-carrier transitions dominate in the microwave and terahertz wavelength range. The tunable plasmonic absorption of patterned graphene adds yet another dimension to graphene photonics. We show that these unique photonic properties of graphene over a broad wavelength range make it promising for many photonic applications such as fast photodetectors, optical modulators, far-infrared filters, polarizers, and electromagnetic wave shields. These graphene photonic devices could find various applications in optical communications, infrared imaging, and national security.