Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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.
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+