A new twist on 'magic-angle' graphene: Tuning resistance with strain

In materials science labs around the world, researchers regularly reproduce a peculiar experiment. Under a microscope, they use tiny robotic manipulators to lay two sheets of carbon, each a single atom thick, against one another. They then rotate the top sheet against the bottom. The two identical lattices of atoms, when twisted relative to one another, bloom into a complex moiré pattern, a shifting complex of honeycomb shapes that grow and shrink as the angle between the layers changes.