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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."
Pictures and the press release.
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Eventually they'll be so common that they'll be pretty much worthless!
Viva la fight against capitalism!
My other processor is big-endian.
And how expensive is that technology ?
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
Do you want to bet how long it will take for a certain criminal, monopolistic, little-african-children abusing cartel to have the research grants revoked, and if that fails, to have an accident happen to the scientists in question?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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...
Some of us could finally get lucky.
You have been eaten by a Hurd of GNU.
We can finally end world hunger with an ampel supply of artifical carrots for everyone!
- python_kiss
Diamonds actually don't last forever, actually. Thermodynamically, it's in the favor of the graphite form of carbon. So all diamonds will eventually turn into graphite.
So whenever you go into a jeweler's shop, try to use that fact to bring the price down.
Yes, thats right, a lump of crystal dug out of a large, polluting hole by minimum wage (if they are lucky) workers by sheer luck, and used to prop up massive corps is SO much better than one produced in a demonstration of our ability to solve extremely difficult technological problems, and produce an identical item.
Of course, in a few years you wont be able to tell which is which, so long as they work out how to add in a few imperfections to make the grown crystal look as poor as the natural one.
About damn time, another artificially produced drain on the common mans pocket toppled.
Maybe that is why DeBeers is fighting this kind of efforts, especially since these artificially produced ones are of better quality than the real ones.
Diamonds are not beautifull when you find them. It is a like a little rock, rough surface, irregular shape, until the cutting and polishing takes place. These artificially made diamonds (it is a diamond, DeBeers does it not want to have that name), are having the basic shapes and most likely will need less cutting.
When there are enough diamonds available, I guess that we will find new applications for it, more usefull applications than a show off how rich we are.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
It's artificial rarity, so it may be poetic justice that "artificial" (not a completely accurate term, since they are indeed "real" diamonds) diamonds are what ultimately bring down the price on the stones.
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.
With the availability of high quality artificial diamonds, we could stop diamond mining. Unfortunately, the diamond mining industries are trying to perpuate their expensive and destructive extraction business by trying to create a special mystique around "natural" diamonds.
So, be aware that the high price you pay for a "natural" diamond is a direct result of the rather unnatural destruction of the environment, together with monopolistic prices charged by the diamond cartels. There are better ways to say "I love you" to someone.
Gonna make me a "glass" house, and then I'm gonna throw me some STONES, oh, yeah.
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.
Its amusing that people are automatically assuming that mass producing diamonds would make the diamond market collapse. While it certainly is a possibility it is highly unlikely due to the following reasons. 1) DeBeers can launch a new marketing ploy and sell their diamonds as naturally forming diamonds compared with man-made diamonds. They could have a larger range of diamonds and infact increase their revenue potential, by charging a higher premium on naturally occuring diamonds. Think of it as a comparision between driving a toyota and a bmw. Toyota for the masses and bmw for the clients who can afford that level of a machine. 2) All tin foil hat conspiracies aside, jewellery is not the only area where diamonds are used so extensively. While it is the most talked about and marketed, diamonds have significant number of uses in industry that such a cheap form of making diamonds would accomodate. 3) Imagine the industries this is going to spawn. Right now they have technology to do laser cutting or painting your picture into glass. Imagine doing the same with a diamond. Debeers will survive, as they will adjust their business model to accomodate this.
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
A large part of a diamond's appeal is that something so stunningly beautiful was formed naturally. We can produce pretty, sparkly stones, but they can never be as beautiful simply because we produced them.
Nice try. Natural diamonds are hardly beautiful. Only when you carefully cut them exactly the right way, and polish them properly, do they appear so beautiful. And it's really hard to argue that diamonds are more beautiful than any other gemstone - almost all of which can be created in the lab now, by the way.
No, diamonds are just the most expensive gem. For no good reason. And thankfully, perhaps not for much longer.
I think I saw a documentary at Discovery Channel about some Russian company that already produces the machines for some years (could be this company). According to the show the traditional diamond industry was so worried that they developed an expensive laser system to discriminate the artificial ones from the natural ones. They could then issue a certificate of 'garanteed blood money' (TM). As a hollywood star/gangsta rapper you of course want to make sure that your hard earned money is well spent on some evil warlord somewhere in Africa.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
To Quote
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It figures... 3 months after I choke on the cost of a rock for my fiancee they release a diamond the size of her head... is there anything these days that doesn't go obsolete?
Next you'll be telling me my new computer is obsolete.
There's always something biger, faster, more sparkly.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
The yellow diamonds that are being referred to in this context are not the fancy and sought-after "canary" variety; they're diamonds with certain impurities in the carbon that give them a yellowish or brownish tint, instead of the clear "white" that is deemed so valuable.
Here's a page with a photo about halfway down that will give you an idea. Another page from the same site shows the various grades of colorless-ness.
A true fancy diamond of any color doesn't fall under these grading systems, obviously. The difference in intensity between the muted yellow-brown of a 'Z' color and a true canary-yellow is like the difference between a glowstick and a krypton-bulb flashlight. See here for some examples of blue, canary, pink, and peach diamonds. (No greens, though; and they're my favorite.)
And for the record: Yes, I Am A Jeweler.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
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.
"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.
Generally speaking, lab-grown crystals of any material used as a gemstone -- most notably the corundum group (sapphires and rubies) -- will have fewer imperfections than mined stones. Both the growth process and the "ingredients" are controlled. There are some trade-offs, though: most lab rubies tend to look pinkish and glassy in comparison to mined rubies, because the growth process is so fast. Lab-grown emeralds usually have too much of a blue tint, and that gives them away. When the only use is in jewelry, appearance is the overriding consideration.
However, that's not the case here. Most lab-created corundum, for instance, isn't used in the jewelry trade. Since it was first "grown" in the late 1800s, various industrial and commercial applications have accounted for most of the production. One example is the "glass" plate over the laser in the grocery barcode scanner: actually made from colorless "sapphire" because it is both harder and tougher than glass. The same goes for lab-created diamonds, which can be used in all kinds of ways. A quick Google search on technological applications turns up a whole mess of hits, and you can see for yourself what one of the manufacturers has to say about potential uses.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
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...
if anyone tells my girlfriend, they'll die a slow and horrible death.
Free as in mason.
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)
You call that a diamond?
This is a diamond.
All funny/paranoia jokes aside, people that get in the way of DeBeers have a way of sudden financial ruin or disappearing. They actively and dilligently seek out and buy or destroy technologies to artificially create gem quality diamonds. Researchers in this field have every reason to be concerned about their security. Scary stuff. Wired did a great article on this very thing a few years ago.
Hah. What about the plaids?
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.
More on this - Epstein wrote what's now considered to be the "classic" expose of the whole De Beers / diamonds racket for The Atlantic Monthly back in 1982.
n d1.htm
It's in 3 parts - here's a link - http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/82feb/8202diamo
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a "good" natural diamond, which won't glow, and a "bad" manufactured diamond, which is "too perfect".
Natural diamonds can be blood diamonds. Cultured diamonds aren't. How does this make natural diamonds "better" than cultured diamonds?
Read their Industry scheme for regulation. Note the phrase "Not to buy any diamonds from suspect or unknown sources of supply". That's all about market control.
Before the "Kimberly Process", diamonds were generally bought and sold, even in DeBeers showings, with no indication of origin. So introducing synthetic diamonds into the market was easier. With the "Kimberly Process" in place, it's much tougher.
The diamond industry has been lobbying countries to require that synthetic diamonds be labelled in some way. The term "cultured diamonds" is widely used, but there's litigation in Germany to require some more negative term, like "synthetic".
DeBeers has also developed identification devices, the DiamondSure and the DiamondView to try to sort out synthetic and natural diamonds. The diamonds produced in high-pressure presses can be identified without much trouble. But grown diamonds are tougher to identify.
Long term, diamond prices will probably crash, like sapphire did once you could buy sapphire bar, tube, and rod.