Its name sounds quite flashy: Boron Carbon Oxynitride, abbreviated BCNO. One day in 2007, this solid compound suddenly materialized in front of Ferry Iskandar while he was conducting some experiments at the Thermal Fluid Engineering and Material Processing Laboratory, Hiroshima University, Japan.

Ferry, who had just been appointed as lecturer at the faculty of Chemical Engineering at Hiroshima University, used boron nitride (BN) material as a heat