Though not a new material by any means, graphene has yet to really come into its moment. The term "graphene" was around going back to the 1980s, and the material existed in the lab in some forms at least a decade before that, but it wasn't until the mid-2000s that researchers really started to manipulate and produce it in ways that began to unlock its potential (this research netted the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, by the way). It is a 2-D pure carbon material, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a particular hexagonal pattern that makes it somewhat similar to graphite, if graphite was a good deal more awesome. It is extremely light, an excellent conductor with some interesting optical properties that haven't been fully explored yet, and is something like 300 times stronger than steel.