This looks very interesting, in particular that it can be made gas-tight:<p>> "Another key feature of 2DPA-1 is that it is impermeable to gases. While other polymers are made from coiled chains with gaps that allow gases to seep through, the new material is made from monomers that lock together like LEGOs, and molecules cannot get between them."<p>However, this is yet another example of how excessive corporatization of academia can block the adoption and spread of new technologies created with taxpayer funds:<p>> "The research was funded by the Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT) an Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Army Research Laboratory."<p>> "The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material..."<p>So, who gets access to these patents? It should be the case that MIT be required to license these patents to any American citizen who is interested, non-exclusively, for free, as it was American taxpayers who financed this project.<p>Similarly, the actual paper is hidden behind a paywall at Nature, so independent researchers without an institutional affiliation have no access to the details without paying ridiculous fees; the paper wasn't uploaded to arxiv and isn't yet on sci-hub, and why not? So some publishers can extract fees for their decrepit business model?<p>Sci-hub_se does at least have copies of some of the references cited in the paper, if you search for this one you'll get the background (2009):
"Two-Dimensional Polymers: Just a Dream of Synthetic Chemists?"<p>> "The fact that one can now isolate and investigate the
natural 2D polymer graphene begs the question as to whether
such intriguing structures could also be synthesized. [5] This
question is not limited to whether one can synthesize
graphene—this would be just one target of the entire family
of 2D polymers, although admittedly an especially compli-
cated and challenging one. It is meant much more general in
the sense: Can one provide reliable and broadly applicable
concepts to tackle the synthetic and analytical issues associ-
ated with the creation of polymers which meet the structural
characteristics of graphene (that is, one repeating unit thick,
covalently bonded, and long-range order). Clearly, this would
constitute a substantial advance for chemistry in particular,
and the molecular sciences in general"