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A Step Toward the Diamond Age
An anonymous reader writes "Carnegie Institution researchers have learned to produce 10-carat, half-inch thick diamonds at rates of about 100 micrometers per hour, which in the diamond biz is blazingly fast. And these aren't cruddy, yellow diamonds either, but gem-quality stones. The goal: A 300 carat beast in whatever shape they want."
And how expensive is that technology ?
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
I thought yellow diamonds (depending on their exact colour) could be worth much more than normal ones. At least, that's what the Antiques Roadshow said on Sunday...
e.g. http://www.yellowdiamonds.co.uk/
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
Also, the price of diamonds is the result of biggest marketing scams of the century. It's pretty much only the last 100-150 years when they were promoted as the #1 gem in jewelry. In ancient/medieval/renaissance times, diamonds weren't held in that much esteem -- coloured gems like rubys were considered more valuable.
Knocking off the price of diamonds is a great thing. I couldn't care less for jewelry, and without the artificially inflated price, we'll be able to use one of the best materials when it comes to hardness, certain conducting properties and so on. Similarily, you can coat connectors with a thin layer of gold to improve them, but it's an expensive thing to do because people tend to hog all gold reserves for monetary purposes.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Come on !. Think about it. They're precious because they are rare, exclusive and pretty much a freak of nature - clear diamonds more so still (probability, my dear watson).
If this will end up producing indistinguishable diamonds , then the market will collapse. IIRC, the artificial rubies made always contain a peice of metal embedded to make sure they are not sold as the real one - it's a question of business ethics for the people who make them (also good old plain advertisement).
To quote Scott Adams: if rabbits were rare and endagered, we'd be buying rabbit shit necklaces for our girlfriends.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The funny thing, this is sort of true... the only reason that anybody bothers to mine rubies or sapphires anymore is for the snob value. You can buy artificial sapphires for under five bucks on Ebay that would cost tens of thousands of dollars if they had the paperwork showing that they were "natural." I bought a couple of handfuls, they're nifty.
Now waiting for nanotubes produced at that rate. Most likely such diamonds will be common by-products of failures at production of nanotubes...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I saw a documentary on TV last year about a firm that is now 'growing' diamonds - sounded similar to this. Anyway, they were growing them at an incredible rate and they were completely flawless (although i don't know that they were able to specify a size).
On the show, they also talked to a rep from De Beers and a diamond merchant. They basically said that the grown diamonds were almost too good. Despite being a bibt worried about it, they seemed like they would adapt to the new environment. De Beers marketing strategy against something like that would be to promote the classical beauty of natural diamonds, or something like that - basically, advertise the 'snob' value of classically mined diamonds, even if they are less perfect.
On a separate note, I am looking forward to advances in Teflon.
I remember Dr Karl Kruszelnicki (Australians would know who he is) talking at my High School during our final year. Someone posed the old favourite question, "if nothing sticks to teflon, how come it sticks to the frying pan?". Apart from his answer, he did one of his trade-mark tangential replies and said that teflon is soft and therefore scracthes easily, but if you could combine teflon with diamonds, then you'd have a surface that nothing sticks to and that wouldn't scrartch. Of course, diamonds are too expensive for that.
So, with the rise of grown diamonds, I look forward to many advances in easy to use cooking gear.
Thank you for your time.
That every 18 months the maximum growable size of an artificial diamond will double.
--A La Moore's Law
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
Slashdotters who regularly vent their anger at Micro$oft's monopoly should read about the diamond industry, monopoly and de Beers.
Unlke MS, the diamond trade costs lives. Sierra Leone, Libera and other West African countries are in ruins because of conflict diamonds. A good book is Blood Diamonds which tells the story of how gems destroyed Sierra Leone.
So, roll on artifical gems I say.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
I remember reading about this a while back in an old issue of Wired magazine. They said that once artificial diamonds become cheap enough, they'll replace silicon in high-end processors because of the thermal conductivity. Diamonds apparently would make much better bases to build chips on than silicon does today.
It doesn't matter. Some other rare thing will replace the diamond and nobody will want diamonds anymore (except for industrial purposes)
Or, perhaps diamonds will be household items and practically everywhere? The Queen of England's jewelry collection contains aluminium pieces that were fantastically valuable when they were originally given to Queen Victoria. Today, mass-produced aluminium jewelry is so cheap it is normally described as 'imitation'.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Read this. Mikimoto changed the face of the pearl market with his technique of culturing pearls.
So potentially, the diamond market also could be changed.
Yes, but Intel and AMD have morals. Well, perhaps not morals but they show some restraint.
:p and so on. In the other, you have a rich-but-not-too-bright guy having his ego tickled by giving an overpriced rock to a woman. Guess which option I would cheer for.
They buy laws and lobby like crazy, but I have yet to hear about Intel sponsoring an assassination, battery or abduction -- and there is way too much rumours about DeBeers using these techniques to dismiss them as unbased.
Plus, it's Intel and co who are the good guys here. In one corner, you have faster electronics, better tools, stronger starship armour
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"10-carat, half-inch thick diamonds at rates of about 100 micrometers per hour."
This characterization will, no doubt, be oft-repeated. But what does it mean? I have no clue.
"Carat" is a measure of weight. Weight is proportional to volume. Volume has 3 dimensions. One of the dimensions is, presumably, 1/2 inch. One of the dimensions is growing at 100 micrometers per hour. What's the 3rd dimension?
Or are all three dimensions growing at 100 uM/h? That would make the diamond a sphere. Not a bad approximation for the shape of a crystal, I suppose. But a 1/2-inch sphere would weigh a bunch more than 10 carats. (A carat is 0.20 mg and the specific gravity of diamond is about 3).
The statement is gibberish to me.
That's just one of it's impressive properties:
Diamond is the best heat conductor known to man, if long thin cylindrical diamonds were available, they would be in huge demand to pipe heat out of CPUs.
Diamonds are ridiculously strong when used in composites, if you thought plain old glass-fibre and carbon fire were strong, simply replace the glass or carbon with diamond, and you have a strength to weight ratio that is unheard of.
Diamonds can be amazingly transparent and durable too of course.
If diamonds become cheap enough, our laptops will have diamond as the substrate for the chips, as heat-pipes, as reinforcement in the cases, and as the top layer of the screen.
As the song (nearly) says... Diamonds are a geek's best friend!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
My uncle was a jeweller and he told me that if you want something rare that you should buy a Ruby or an Emerald. Diamonds are a dime a dozen, or if DeBeers opened their warehouses, they would be.
As to the original post, I must say, I had heard about this before too, I checked out one of the russian sites and a 5 Carat diamond was going for about $2000.
With that said, I am waiting until I can get my GF a diamond that introduces its self as Irving before she opens her mouth to show it off.
flinging poop since 1969
The best example I have seen of this is what happens when an artificial diamond is put under uv light, it glows a brilliant purple(which looks amazing), natural made dimonds dont do this because of impurities but man made ones are far more pure.
The parent article says that man made diamonds are made in an impure environment which is bullshit, how pure does he really think coal in the ground is?. In a lab they would minimize the impurities as much as possible otherwise the whole thing would be pointless.
Diamonds will not turn into graphite under normal conditions, they're pretty stable as long as you don't heat them.
;)
However, diamonds will turn into graphite and, if oxygen is present, burn at elevated temperatures.
Therefore, all diamonds on earth will be destroyed once the sun goes nova and gobbles up the planet
at the end of 2100 (3rd in the series of 2001[which was a short story actually] and 2010), it turns out that one of the moons of jupiter is covered in ... diamonds. the epilogue of the book describes a world where diamonds are as plentiful as dirt, and they are used in completely mundane ways like as a building material.
i thought that was a fascinating thought - if diamonds were as cheap as cement, imagine how many ways you could use the hardest known substance in the world...
Apart from the new technological possibilities offered by cheap diamonds, there are significant positive social implications as well. Maybe some day the bloody diamond-money funded wars will be over. Another big social innovative thing will be cheap and clean hydrogen energy. But who knows what de Beers and the oil corporations have up their sleeves that will screw us all (well, mainly those in Africa and in the middle-east).
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Actually, to me diamonds say, "I'm too busy to deal with our real problems; so, take this and then shut up and fuck me for awhile until I have to go off to another board meeting."
I like my jewelry quiet and stolid, so I buy stainless steel almost exclusively. It also leads to some great heated conversations about the aesthetics and wonderfully functional nature of such jewelry over the more traditional sort. I don't really get a chance to have this talk much, but when I do it's really great until she inevitably dumps me for some guy who just gets her diamonds or something. Well, whatever. Stainless steel says I love you even more.
According to the Wikipedia article, "About 130 million carats (26,000 kg) of diamonds are mined annually."
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Actually, that UV marking is done on purpose in order to allow cultured diamonds to be easily identified.
I work for CVD Diamond company and we already produce fake diamond but only for industrial purposes because if we were to make gem quality diamonds DeBeers would just drop the prices and we would be out of bussiness. Right we consetrating on cutting tools.
It's gonna be just like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when the last fool you thought had bought into such idiotic corporate drivel points at you and screams, "DeBeers".
Man made beer is better than natural beer.
Man made bread is better than natural bread.
Man made acid is better than ergot extract.
Man made shoes are better than tying dead possums to you feet with some mulberry bark.
the laser inscription on "genuine" diamonds was ostensibly put in place to prevent the sale of "blood diamonds" which fund the slaughter in various west African countries--Sierre Leon among them (as opposed to funding the oppression of South African blacks in deBeers diamond operations). I agree though, that the real reason debeers natural diamonds have laser inscriptions is to disinguish them from high quality CVD diamonds. Natural diamonds are easily distinguished from older process artificial diamonds which have distinctive trace chemical signatures from the solvents used in the creation of the diamonds. Or so I've heard.
More music, fewer hits
Look, the reason diamonds are valuable is that they have a perceived value among the general populace. Similar to paper money's real value set by the money market. Among those in the general populace are women and you show your appreciation for a woman by spending your means on her. The easiest way for a woman to proudly show her value in your eyes is to wear a N-carat diamond (where N is at least in the 95th percentile of the affordability of your social group). Sure, it may make more since to you to give her something of actual value but who would understand the value of a Moon rock hanging around her neck? No, it is the perceived, commonly attributed value of the diamond that makes it so valuable.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Maybe if you knew what coal WAS, you might get some inkling of the "myth" behind coal and diamonds. Coal is naturally compressed carbon, usually from the decomposition of biomass. It can be up to 98% pure carbon and the impurities can be squeezed out or squeezed into the lattice as the molecules find tighter and tighter packing arrangements. Basically, carbon deposits could be coal or graphite, except for the fluke arrangement of higher environmental pressure and heat from volcanic activity. http://www.showcaves.com/english/explain/Mines/Dia mond.html
http://www.ket.org/Trips/Coal/Glossary.html
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I can tell you plainly that diamonds come from coal because I work at an iron pipe plant that uses coal to fuel its furnace. You can grab a large handful of it off the ground and if you look closely you can find 2 or 3 diamonds in the rough.
These aren't worth much because they are small, for the most part impure, and because diamonds are only valuable on the first sale by the jewelery stores.
>I, for one, would very much prefer a man-made diamond.
You're not alone in that, but jewelers are still resisting like mad. My fiance went around trying to get a Gemesis stone locally a while ago -- jewelers actually SCREAMED at him. We eventually decided to go with a sapphire anyway. (But I see those Gemesis blues coming out... so tempting!)
Lea
Diamonds are not as rare as you think. It just that a corrupt cartel controls the major sources to keep the price up. IIRC, emeralds are rarer, though less expensive.
I can't find the source but, when the Soviet Union fell they were sitting on a large stock of high grade diamonds, the cartel paid them not to release the diamonds on the market to keep the prices up.
Also they have a history of when ever it looks like a new diamond source is being developed they increase the supply and depress the prices just enough to make it uneconomical. And then raise prices again when the attempt fails.
Diamonds are for suckers.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...and coal is composed primarily of carbon. The carbon involved in diamond formation can be inorganic or organic in nature. Any organic carbon, including that in coal, that is caught in a subduction zone may be turned into a diamond and blown out in kimberlite later.
And what do you know, there's even data to support that natural diamonds are composed heavily of organic carbon. You know, like coal.
Of course, squeezing a lump of coal until the carbon in it turned into diamond would probably result in a pretty impure diamond.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Have been manufactured for a couple years now:h tml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
No, it isn't romantic unless you spend the DeBeers required two months salary on the thing.
Or with cultured diamonds you can spend the same two month salaries and get her a multi-stone engagement ring, and matching diamond earings and a necklace. Wouldn't that be smart and romantic at the same time?
I used Dirtcheapdiamonds.com. Dont let the name fool you, they are the best quality and simply amazing customer service. My diamond came with all the papers, a jewelers eyeglass, a book, and a very very nice diamond ring case with a light inside when it opens. I saved about 3 grand on my diamond.
Never EVER buy in store!
NEVER EVER!
http://dirtcheapdiamonds.com/
Be sure to check their NBC news video who ran a feature on them. http://dirtcheapdiamonds.com/news4.cfm
"I don't think man made diamonds are ever going to eclipse natural ones for jewelry" - I will have to disagree with you there.
I know there will always be a niche market (read people with more sense than money) who will always want naturally grown diamonds, however I think most folks will actually not care. Most (uneducated) diamond buyers simply look for 3 things beauty, cost , and carat (wow factor). This is the only reason stores such as Zales can stay in business. They sell the worst diamonds around (I-2's for their regular merchandise - usually up to $1500 and SI-2's for their "Zales Diamond", note that most reputable jewlers won't touch I-2 diamonds). The reason Zales (and other maul stores) sell so much merchandise is first location and 2nd the design, pricing and wow factor (1 carart ring for how much?!).
Now back to synthetic diamonds, eventually most folks will realize that choosing a natural diamond over a synthetic just "'cause it has to be naturally grown" is like choosing furniture built of trees that were grown naturally in a forrest vs using trees that were planted and grown on a farm. There both real trees (plus you'll get less defects in your furniture with the farm grown trees).
Now there's already a lot of companies out there growing diamonds. Check out:
Gemesis in Florida
Apollo Diamond (which uses Carbon Vapor Deposition)
Life Gem- turn the ashes of a deceased loved one into a diamond
There was also an interesting article about it on Wired a ways back: The New Diamond Age
And lastly the one "book" that taught me everything I could have ever wanted to know about the diamond business: The Diamond Invention Very interesting read.
Intersting note, after all the research and shopping (and shopping and more shopping) that I did when I was looking for an engagement ring (including researching Synthetic Diamonds) I decided on having a ring custom made by a local jeweler using moissanites instead of diamonds. Ended being a very beautiful and unique ring of a much higher quality than a mass produced setting and with quite a bit of geek factor to it as well. So I think folks will be accepting of synthetic diamonds once production ramps up to the demand (right now Gemesis is growing as fast as it can).
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