Some on this board have postulated that Zenyatta's graphite may be pure enough to "refine" into graphene. I don't now how that works but I bet soneone on this board does.

Here are Agora Financial's recent thoughts about graphene in the latest Five Minute Forecast.

"The room was filled with good ideas," a researcher recently told our own Byron King, "and most of them have the potential to become billion-dollar industries."

Though the media hype for graphene has died down a bit recently, behind the scenes, Byron reports things couldn't be better for the "magic material."

"Across the world," Byron writes, "literally thousands of entities are pursuing research into graphene and related substances. This includes dozens of governments and government labs -- all the usual suspect nations, of course.

"There are hundreds of universities with major, well-funded carbon programs -- usually in the chemistry or physics departments, but also in engineering, electronics, robotics, life sciences, material science, computing and more. Plus, thousands of companies with related programs, ranging from giants like IBM, Siemens and Samsung down to little startups."

The list goes on.

"Thus," says Byron, "it's fair to say that despite the often 'cooperative' nature of much basic scientific research, when it comes to graphene, everybody is trying to get a jump on everybody else. And progress is spectacular."

What's another lesser-discussed industry taking a wide interest in the "magic material"? Defense.

It was engineers at Lockheed Martin, for example, who discovered a way to remove salt from seawater with graphene -- using far less energy than other methods. Graphene research was also part of the Pentagon's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program that issued $260 million to specific university research projects.

DARPA, too: The Pentagon's high-tech arm issued a $2.4 million grant to a company in New York to create graphene-based electronics for military radio applications.

And let's not forget the implications of the supercapacitor: "Graphene supercapacitors combine the quick charge time of an ordinary capacitor with energy storage capacity comparable to that of a long-life battery," Byron recounts. "Do you think that the Department of Defense might be interested in these devices to power, say, energy weapons like rail guns and lasers?"