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Pencil 'Lead' Mightier than Diamonds?
GuardianBob420 writes "Space Daily is reporting that a team of researchers has used a combination of extreme pressure and irradiation to alter the molecular structure of graphite -- resulting in a previously unobserved super-hard form of the stuff.
From the article: 'The graphite that resulted from our experiment was so hard that when we released the pressure we saw that it had actually cracked the diamond anvil.'"
Does this mean deBeers will offer graphite engagement rings?
Ducks...
I think you mean the pencil is mightier than the sword.
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
Now instead of a diamond ring, I just have to get her a number -9e-62 pencil! Now if I can only figure out where to get one....
This sig no verb.
I want that diamond anvil!
Does this really prove anything? I broke lots of glass windows with rubber balls as a kid.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
...that if they could mass-produce it could completely change our lives.
I tell ya, there's a revolution in materials engineering happening. There are so many substances being discovered or created that have radical properties these days. Sooner or later one of them will be mass-produced cheaply and efficiently and we will have space elevators and super-powerful batteries and all kinds of other cool stuff.
You know, it's a good thing Wile E. Coyote never got a hold of a diamond anvil.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
If you're rich enough to have a record collection,
:)
I'll bring my bazooka round for inspection.
C30 C60 C90 go
see-three-oh see-six-oh
C30 C60 C90 go
see-ninety-go
three-oh six-oh nine-oh
GO!
- Bow Wow Wow
-1, Offtopic, I know, I know. C'mon, moderators, give it your best shot, I can take it!
I now have a response to all those people who called me a pencil-dick!
Imagine a popular geek writer penning a novel about an era when nanotech is rampant and carbon crystals are ubiquitous.
Imagine reading that novel.
Imagine
meh.
Now I can get some mechanical pencil lead that won't break all the time. Or even smudge!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
The article tells very little about the strength of the compressed graphite crystals.
Are they just "hard", and able to pass any scratch test thrown at them, or are they "strong", and able to support heavy loads(such as a space elevator!?).
Either way, the manufacturing process being used is only able to produce small samples, and is very similar to the process used to create artificial diamonds (from the text of the article, it appears that the process is the same, but with a few steps added in)
Diamonds may be hard, but have very little 'real' use, and aren't exactly strong. We have already proven our ability to (at great expense) manufacture synthetic diamonds, but have yet to find many useful applications for them (other than sawblades, etc...). In addition, it is very difficult (physically impossible) to make them into useful shapes without cutting them into very small pieces and using a bonding agent due to their crystaline structure.
Either way, this should prove to be interesting. I could definitely see this replacing diamonds in industrial applications. In addition, the graphite which forms these new crystals is much harder AND much stronger than the coal used to form diamonds. I wonder if the new substance is thermally conductive....... it certianly could be!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's spelled p e d a n t i c, you nitwit! </pedantic>
My bicyles
Upon first glance at that story one could point out a handful of blatantly false statements that the 'journalist' had embellished upon the presumed press release. To start with, the caption on the bizzare first image ignored atomic carbon (carbon black), nanotubes and the veritable zoo of non-C60 fullerenes.
Secondly the x-rays were not used to form the substance, but to analyse its structure. Hardness is not measured by an ability to crack, it's an ability to scratch. I could crack a diamond with a metal hammer, it doesn't make it harder.
The experimenter neatly summarises the novelty with "This experiment is the first to determine quantitatively how the bonding in graphite changes under high-pressure conditions.". But the article completely ignores what this new bonding is. These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?
The summaries in the other stories crowding this one on the page are equally laughable. Anyone can see in the diagram of C60 that it doesn't have 60 sides. In fact if anyone can understand any of the images on the page then you're doing pretty well.
Finally, you've got to love this gem at the bottom:
"AD SPACE FOR SALE
THIS POSITION $4,000/YEAR
FOR 200x60 PIXEL BANNER
More Ad Rates".
Walk, don't run kids!
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
Horrible. How the fuck would you mod them?
> Or very lightweight airplanes.
>Imagine taller skyscrapers.
There's a very sick joke in there about what happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object, and I'm going straight to hell for even hinting at it.
Yeah, that aggravated me too. Actually, even chemists consider buckys to be a third allotrope as carbon. As a chemist, I consider it bullshit for the same reason you mention. For what it's worth, Carbon-black is not pure carbon - it's a misture of large polynuclear hydrocarbons. It's graphite-like, but does contain hydrogen.
These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?
I was annoyed by the same - fortunately, my school has a subscription to Science. Graphite, of course, is a planar, sp2 hybridized structure that forms layers of sheets. The sheets are staggered by half a ring, so that half of the carbons are centered over another carbon, and half are centered over the middle of a ring. Under high enough pressure, the carbons that are right over each other form a sigma bond. According to the article, this happens gradually over a range of like 10-20 GPa, with theoretically half the carbons ultimately forming interplane sigma bonds if one considered a two-plane system.
Unfortunately, even the Science article was stingy on the details (as they tend to be).
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Get real. This is Slashdot. Watch us imagine a Beowulf cluster of the stuff. :)
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