Skip to main content

Like your whisky straight, no color? Graphene turns aged spirit transparent

whisky filtering graphene 87671472 l
Kichigin Aleksandr/123RF
Looking for a geeky magic trick to show your friends? All you need is a supply of all-around wonder material graphene and some booze. A membrane made of graphene oxide (GO), aka the world’s thinnest material, can filter the color out of whisky — leaving it as a transparent liquid you could potentially sip from a water glass throughout the day, with no one being the wiser. Well, the alcoholic beverage does retain one crucial telltale trait — its smell.

While the whisky component of the experiment is its most eye-catching element, the most exciting part of the work is actually the development of the ultrathin membrane itself. These new graphene-oxide sheets are assembled in such a way that pinholes formed during the assembly process produce an atomic-scale sieve, which can carry out incredibly fine grain filtering.

“Using GO membranes, we filtered several dye molecules — as small as 1 nanometer — dissolved in organic solvents, and found that the GO membrane only allows solvents to permeate, while blocking the dye molecules depending on their molecular size,” Professor Rahul Nair from the U.K.’s University of Manchester told Digital Trends. “The absence of dye molecule permeation was apparent even from the color of the solution after filtration. The original dye solution is colorful, while after filtering through the GO membrane, the solution lost its color and became a pure solvent.”

As to how this could be used in the real world, Dr. Yang Su, who also worked on the project, said: “Many chemical-related industries could [benefit] from this research — from [the] pharmaceutical and petroleum industry to food production. For example, in pharmaceutical manufacturing, most of the active ingredients are dissolved in organic solvent. Our research would enable efficient, stable extraction of the pharmaceutical ingredients from their organic solvents.” This could help reduce the costs of molecular extraction.

The team tested various dye molecules in addition to whisky and cognac. After filtering the whisky through the graphene-oxide membrane, its amber color (the result of small molecules leached from the oak barrels during production) was removed. As to how this affects the taste, Nair said, “We haven’t tested the flavor yet, due to safety rules in the lab.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Nature Materials.

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more