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New Material Harder Than Diamond
h4x0r-3l337 writes "Diamond is no longer the hardest substance known to man. Scientists have created a new material, called "aggregated diamond nanorods" by compressing carbon-60 under high heat. From the article: 'The hardness of a material is measured by its isothermal bulk modulus. Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond.'"
491 gigapascals.... Wow!!!
WTF is a gigapascal?
A butter knife made entirely out of THAT!
So I guess this is what she's going to want on her finger now.
Forgive my ignorance after Reading TFA... but this "harder than diamond" material is... made of diamonds! Seems like false advertising, though I get what they did.
Can this be used in the Space Lift project?
Diamonds will come down in price? If we could make a drill out of this new material, doesn't that mean we would have a surplus of diamond to use? And who gets the dub the name for this material?
Diamonds are not forever
26 August 2005
Physicists in Germany have created a material that is harder than diamond. Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues at the University of Bayreuth made the new material by subjecting carbon-60 molecules to immense pressures. The new form of carbon, which is known as aggregated diamond nanorods, is expected to have many industrial applications (App. Phys. Lett. 87 083106).
The hardness of a material is measured by its isothermal bulk modulus. Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond. Dubrovinskaia and two of her co-workers - Leonid Dubrovinky and Falko Langenhorst - have patented the process used to make the new material.
Diamond derives its hardness from the fact that each carbon atom is connected to four other atoms by strong covalent bonds. The new material is different in that it is made of tiny interlocking diamond rods. Each rod is a crystal that has a diameter of between 5 and 20 nanometres and a length of about 1 micron.
The group created the ADNRs by compressing the carbon-60 molecules to 20 GPa, which is nearly 200 times atmospheric pressure, while simultaneously heating to 2500 Kelvin. "The synthesis was possible due to a unique 5000-tonne multianvil press at Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth that is capable of reaching pressures of 25 GPa and temperatures of 2700 K at the same time," Dubrovinskaia told PhysicsWeb.
The Bayreuth team measured the properties of the samples with a diamond anvil cell at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at Grenoble in France. These measurements indicated that ADNRs are about 0.3% denser than diamond, and that the new material has the lowest compressibility of any known material.
In addition to working out why the new material is so hard, the Bayreuth team also hope to exploit its industrial potential. "We have developed a concept for innovative technology to produce the novel material in industrial-scale quantities and now we are looking for partners in order to realize our ideas," said Dubrovinskaia.
...a diamond is forever
So when are we going to see a General Products hull constructed out of this?
--
BMO - Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Kzinti
Now I finaly know what IBM stands for.
I don't care how hard it is, I am not buying my wife a new ring.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Long time ago, when I was student, I bought a very good russian thermodynamics book (Kirillin) where they said Borazon synthetic material be harder than diamond. It is a pity Wikipedia does not agree with that fact.
Of course, the thermodynamic process to achieve it was far expensive. Required very high pressure and temperatures.
diamonds are actually not that rare, emeralds and rubies are rarer.
Industrial diamonds are pretty plentifull
OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest, and that this does not open up whole new frontiers of exciting materials - or am I completely wrong here? Is there some magical "limit" that was exceeded by this? If there *IS* a magical limit somewhere, what is it?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
How stable is it? Diamond is really hard and also stable for a long time (a diamond is forever...). I RTFA and it didn't say anything about stability, so I'm wondering if anybody else knows. If they want to use it in an industrial setting, it's going to need to be stable for a long period of time.
Also, I too wonder what the structure must look like. Neat article and neat material.
Why'd you marry such shallow, pathetic women?
Is this what the viagra ads meant when they said 20% harder?
Enhance your carbon based member now! EXRNZ
Impressive results, you'll be the hardest she's ever seen! Become the new hard you.
--
You cant talk about anything around here without someone thinking about it sexually
When do they start selling sandpaper with this stuff so I can ruin all my rich friends' wives rings and laugh at them? They totally deserve it for spending $300 on a ring in the first place. Stupid jerks.
Why'd you marry such shallow, pathetic women?
What -- you mean there's some other kind?
It is, after all, a measure of strength in compression, which is completely different from hardness.
How about giving us figures for hardness? Like the Brinell Hardness Number or the results of the Rockwell hardness test?
-Shaunak
Are you a fucking moron? This isn't a new substance, it's just a more tightly packed and more highly organized version of a conventional diamond. It's still a diamond. I mean if it was some new alloy or new substance altogether, that would be one thing. But this is still just plain ol' carbon--just specially treated to be harder than the run-of-the-mill industrial diamonds we use now.
Nathan
Anyone else having the sudden urge to get their fiancée one of these bad boys so they can scratch the hell out of lesser gemstones?
i call fud
For a good description of Hardness measuring methods, See this page
-Shaunak
Get me a plenctor from this material.. I'll pick my guitar and play the hardest rock mankind ever heard..
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
Its the product of living in a society that is obsessed with materialism.
I mean, really, "Aggregated diamond nanorods are a girl's best friend" just doesn't have the same catchy ring to it. :P
Would come down ... that is if De Beers could be regulated and stop their monopolistic practices of artificilly limiting diamond supply to keep prices up.
.. they can afford to.
still Emeralds and other jems are rarer than diamonds and should there for be worth more, but since De Beers controls the supply of diamonds and spends stupid amounts of money telling everyone how "rare diamonds really are" , prices will always be what they are.
( go google it if you dont believe me )
ever wonder why every 4 / 6 months you see jewelery adverts saying *OMGz , 50% off*
yeah
Still , if it keeps the little woman happy and people dont bother thinking about it, De Beers is always going to have demand far out strip the supply it is willing to give and make lots and LOTS of money.
There's no way these guys can claim priority here. It completely stretches all notions of credulity. I mean, Superman has been transforming coal into diamonds with his bare hands for nearly 60 years now (first mention Action Comics #115; 1947). Together with his optical super-powers, in this case I'm of course referring to what is simplistically referred to as his "heat vision", it's clear that Superman could generate the required pressure and heat with almost no effort. He probably discovered this new diamond stuff by accident when he was like 8 or something. Jeez, I can't believe the crap that makes it through peer review these days.
We're (laregly) made of carbon. Diamonds, the (formerly) hardest substance known to exist, is made of carbon. This new material is also made of carbon.
Carbon is also the basis for buckyballs, nanotubes, and recently, nanofabric.
What is it about carbon that's so special? Can these things be done with other elements, like nitrogen? Is it just because we have an oil (carbon) based economy, or what?
Seems like all the interesting stuff in materials physics in early 2000's is ALL CARBON!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Aggregated diamond nanorods is a bit of a mouthful... shall we call it Adinar? Agdian? Xena? Buffy?
This can't possibly be harder than adamantium. Otherwise Captain America would have used it instead for his shield.
you have somebody just chasing you with Anti-Mod points. At worse, you were not funny, but off topic? hummmm.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Apparently these guys haven't heard of Ultrahard Fullerite.
Artificial diamonds were first developed in Kiev, Ukraine at the University for Superhard Materials. Later, there were plans to make them into armor (armored cars, armored vests, etc.).
-Palal
I though Jack Thompsons' head was the hardest material.
The link goes to a legitimate source. Not a goatse link. Fucking trolls.
for a measely 69 gigapascals
The old scale is broken.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Engraved diamonds for your girlfriends, anyone?
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
Jeez, just do what the rest of us Slashdotters do. Trust me, you won't go blind or grow hair on your palms. On the other hand (hah!) the carpal tunnel's a bitch.
Let me be the first to suggest we call it Unobtainium. But since the material really exists and is obtainable... Um, I think I broke my brain. I go to bed now.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
"God was very moving and erotic *snort*"
"How erotic?"
"I was at 420 gigapascals!"
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Wait, weren't bucky balls (Buckminster Fullerene) harder than diamond?
;-)
I could be wrong, of course
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
Bulk Modulus
And because neither of the above really explains anything, here's a better explanation of Bulk Modulus (With lots of neat graphs & charts on the left side of the page)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Your stupid wives don't want diamonds because they're the hardest thing around. In fact, they probably don't even want you for that reason, either.
on the hardness scale
"But this goes to eleven"
Anything made of carbon can be vaporised with a blue flame.
Most (if not all) of the diamond in diamond coated drills are produced through this process.
There are several processes for putting diamond onto the lap/saw/drill. Some diamonds (natural or synthetic) are brazed onto the material, many saws and diamond wheels actually have diamond impregnated metal so as it wears, cutting action is not degraded and the cheapest method is really close to gluing the damn things to the material. In this instance, it is almost always synthetic. In gem faceting, diamond powder is actually sprinkled onto a lap and rolled into it or used as a slurry.
But as far as "most" goes, "most" diamond tools are not diamond at all but silicon carbide. And even then, it depends on the application for the lap, drill or saw. Depending on the material you are cutting or polishing, natural diamond is preferred to synthetic. This is the case when polishing diamonds and sapphires.
Also, there are a number of "fake" diamonds in the market already, none of which have had any impact on the diamond as a gem. The most common are CZ (cubic zirconia) and Moissanite which is a compressed carbon, also known as silicon carbide, and naturally occurring in meteorites but made for the market in labs. Other "brands" of fake diamonds are usually Moissanite. In diamond testing, cz fails thermal tests, Moissanite passes but fails on conductivity.
R(k)
Does this mean I have to replace my wifes diamond ring with this new material, so she can have something thats better than diamond? Joking aside, I would have to say the last four years alone, we have made more breakthroughs that actually MEANT something to our existance, and could be used to apply in the workfield, than we ever have in a long time.... I would really like to see further progression with this line of research... If something could be made thats stronger than this stuff... we should have the next wave of Ginsu knives showing late at night when we can't sleep, and find ourselves posting on slashdot at 4 am in the morning... Now that would be a deal!
Just me
> Why'd you marry such shallow, pathetic women?
What -- you mean there's some other kind?
I think the AC was suggesting that people should broaden their horizons.
.....
Wow, I didn't know Comic Book Guy lurked on Slashdot.....
Think about the crazy shapes they can cut diamond rings into now.
Diamonds are a girls best friend... I wonder if you can make a jewellry out of it? :D
I'm sure that Batmans new armour will be made from it
When I worked at a machine shop, it really was expensive to keep the tips of tool's that cut materials to not become dull. It is possible with this new invention that they could start making cutting tools for lathes/mills that would last a lot longer than the diamond tipped tools they use now. This could potentially lower the cost of a lot of items (unless the companies just keep the revenue for themselves).
To the submitter, learn to read!
must...resist...jokes about nano rods... and... girlfriends...
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Yeahbut, not as shiny, I'll bet...
q
Finally, I'll be able to drill into that 10ft diamond I found in the garden.
I'm sure there's gold in the center of it!
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
The article states in the title "Diamonds are not forever". This was true even before this new material was created. Real diamonds decade into graphite. It takes many years (millions), but diamond is not the most stable version of carbon atoms, even if it is the hardest.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
'denser than diamonds'
rather than what is currently writter: 'harder than diamonds'
This is meant to be the reporting of a science story you know!
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One stands for danger; the other for opportunity
Obligatory. adj. Of the nature of an obligation; compulsory: Attendance is obligatory. Mathematics is an obligatory course.
Research has shown that the plate in front of the average /. poster is harder and tougher than any other material known to man. It is just impossible to penetrate.
So the article is totally wrong anyway (-:
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
two words: big boobs
/pro
C1ali5 - aggregated diamond nanorods hard!!!
:-( I wonder how they guessed my email address:
I just deleted a cialis spam from my gmail account.
bill.gates@gmail.com
damn them!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
...and have been for a long time. Making synthetic diamonds which are on a size and quality scale appropriate for non-industrial uses -- that's what's shaking things up.
My boss' head has been made out of this stuff for YEARS now!
Science disproves each and every past theory while creating new and exciting ones to be disproved later !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
You must ahve an interesting definition of 'to win'.
Come and meet your uncle ROD ! (you do not expect me to sign this....)
I'm not familiar with the units, so is the difference in hardness of 49 Gpa a lot?
I remember reading that the difference in hardness from Tungsten Carbide to Diamond was greater than the difference from Tungsten Carbide to Talc (the softest mineral). Could somebody give us a hint here?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So eventually, we'll see with nano-engineered diamond necklaces around rappers' necks?
Full Tilt
So buy "cultured" diamonds rather than mined ones.
http://gemesis.com/home.htm
Market economics at work. Someone keeps prices artificially high, someone else comes along and bursts their bubble.
I personally think opals are far more beautiful than diamonds.
http://www.australianopals.com/
Deleted
There's only one kind for those that are blind.
"Together with his optical super-powers, in this case I'm of course referring to what is simplistically referred to as his 'heat vision'"
I suppose now I'll always think of cyclops on x-men as having 'heat vision' instead of 'laser eyes'.
My life is ruined... just ruined...
Reading TFA, they apparently used a Diamond Anvil Cell to measure the hardness. This apprently consists of "two opposing cone-shaped diamonds squeezed together by a lever arm" (wikipedia).
So my question is: If this stuff is harder than diamonds, surely the "opposing cone-shaped diamonds" would deform before the sample being measured?
Want a rod harder than diamond? German physicists have teamed up with Viagr...
This one goes to 11?
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
couldn't they have come up with a better name. Sure that maybe the technical name but really.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
An aggregated diamond nanorod is forever.
SPAM
You get what you deserve, dude.
I don't know what to be more disturbed about. a. the fact that you knew which comic it was in or b. that I immediately had to figure out a Google to prove to check your facts! Superman's Powers
Well lets call it 'kryptonite' then...
AC.
*coughs* Cyclops' "Eye Beams" are purely concussive in nature. Not heat at all.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
A material can be harder than diamond, but how brittle is it? What scale did they use?
...
Glass is a hard material (5.5 on the Mohs Scale of Hardness), but if you hit it just right
I do not see any text supporting that ADNRs are not able to be scratched by diamond. It may be possible that the two materials (diamond and ADNRs) are able to scratch one another. AFAIK the Rockwell test is used for naturally occurring substances anyways.
Has the Rockwell test been accepted for non-natural substances?
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
"aggregated diamond nanorods are a girls best friend" just doesn't have the same "ring"
There we are, two bad jokes in one sentence
Jaj
How much more stiffer would she want it to be?!!
I guess this redefines the expression "Giving hard love to a woman."
Ours go to eleven.
I RTFA - must disagree.
Nobody rocks harder than King Diamond.
Many women are just duped into thinking buying an expensive ring is required and expected. Too much TV and cinema me thinks.
I think these guys need to check with my wife. To this day she claims my head is the hardest thing known...
You know, this sucks...
I just after 29 yrs of waiting found a beautiful young woman...and I just asked her to marry me and gave her a diamond ring containing what was then the hardest substance known to man...
And no sooner than I buy the ring and give it to her does it become outdated.
*I can't win!*
Everything I buy is outdated a week later...
will it get me laid?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My wife didn't want a diamond ring when we got engaged or married -- just a simple gold band. She thought it was a better idea to save that money for a down payment on a house. You've got to love a woman who's smart enough not to be influenced by pretty baubles.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The group created the ADNRs by compressing the carbon-60 molecules to 20 GPa, which is nearly 200 times atmospheric pressure
200 atmospheres? That's not much pressure. SCUBA divers regularly put more pressure than that in tanks they wear strapped to their backs.
According to the "units" program on my laptop, 20 GPa is 197,384.65 atmospheres. 200 *thousand* atomospheres... that makes more sense.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wrong on both accounts... Cyclops' eye beams exert force, but no heat. Of course, I haven't read comics in over 10 years, maybe they changed it.
;-)
You can relax, or freak out even more, I'm not sure which.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Not to disrespect you or your wife, but the whole myth behind the huge diamond ring is that the man is supposed to be able to afford a rock of some arbitrary size where larger is better AND a house, etc, etc.
Want to talk about an excellent marketing scheme. The more recent ads telling us that we need to spend "2 months salary" even gauges how much to spend regardless of your income! Brilliant.
my penis? I woke up this morning and it could cut diamonds. Ooh rah!
two words: big boobs
I would expect that a significant portion of the Slashdot readership already has those available-- without needing to involve women.
DIamond is no longer the strongest material known to man. The new winner.... diamond.
Geez. I usually don't complain about the editors, but...
Imagine a beowolf cluster of those running quake...
Such a substance is known for quite some time. It is called "Ultrahard fullerite". It is about 1.3 harder than traditional diamonds (absolute hardness).
Essentially the ultrahard fullerite is a C_60 with unique 3d polymer bonds.
Just check : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrahard_fullerite
We've been doing that for years. It's called "carpentry" and it uses these cool bio-tech machines called "trees" to convert atomospheric carbon and water into complex hydrocarbon structures known as "wood".
You have to have a source of trace minerals (typically through a "ground" or "earth" connection) but the majority of the created structures are built from atmospheric carbon and hydrogen from water. The created material is incredibly useful and can be formed with little effort using commonly available tools.
Oh, and the best part is, the process is entirely solar-powered. There's a little reverse carbon leakage when solar energy is not available (a condition we call "night") but it's negligible.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Thus spake Calvin: "Isn't it weird how scientists can imagine all the matter of the universe exploding out of a dot smaller than the head of a pin, but they can't come up with a more evocative name for it than 'the Big Bang'? That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
"Aggregated Diamond Nanorods?" Criminy, they couldn't call it "admantium" or something? Do they call their shirts "woven cotton planes aproximately tailored to the human torso"?
Oh, I see they reinvented fruitcake. ;)
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Love your women. Educate them on the power of marketing to create synthetic needs, and despise the peddlers instead.
...about carbon nitride? Sounds so very familiar... Except back then they were using Schrodinger's equation to extrapolate harder substances and then trying to make them so it revolved around that theory more than anything else.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Compressed Osmium poder has a bulk modulus of 462 GPa, thus harder than diamond. "Diamond is no longer the hardest substance known to man". This has been known for over 3 years. Should read 'Compressed Osmium powder is no longer the hardest substance known to man'.
When I was a kid, about 5, my mother told me that diamonds were carbon, the same as charcoal, just really, really compressed. So I took out some pliers and squeezed realllllyy hard to try to make some. It took a week before I admitted defeat.
These days, I am trying to port NetBSD to a netgear router, with the NetBSD forums for the sbmips port being completely a ghost town. It may be an similar task to that which I tried as a kid. But I have MUCH bigger pliers now!
I had to look this up... General Products.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
because Russian scientists haven't developed any alternative yet
mmmmm, rich creamery butter.
A butter knife made entirely out of THAT!
You TERRORIST! Won't anyone please think of the children?
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
In Soviet Russia, wives sell you to diamonds.
Speaking of other kinds of women, I read a statistic in the paper yesterday that said that there are more than 20,000 battered women in my city alone.
And to think, all this time I have been eating them plain.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Diamond, graphite and fullerenes are actually allotropes , not polymers. Allotropes are different physical forms of the same element. Polymers are large molecules built from long chains of connected monomers -- repeating small groups of atoms. An allotrope by definition always has atoms of one element only, whereas polymers can have atoms of several different elements.
Scroogle
i wish i had mod points for you, that one was great.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
I started off wanting to mod you down, but I decided instead to respond instead.
... *sigh*
You are entirely correct! Trees and anything with Chlorophyll are basically CO2 'scrubbers'. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it's very likely that we as humans will not be able to come up with anything more efficient than what nature has given us.
Oh blah, I just did a "me too"
Just to add to this discussion, the PROBLEM is, we are sucking decomposed biological stuff (oil) from deep in the earth and burning it at a phenominal rate. That is the problem with CO2 crazyness, not lack of greenery converting it for us. Blah blah, I'll shut up now.
When my wife and I picked out our rings, the sales guy said "...and there's a diamond in the centre there..." My wife-to-be said, "Oh, really?" in a somewhat disappointed voice. And sure enough, there was a miniscule diamond in the centre of the design, so small that we'd missed it entirely. I looked at her, read her expression as being as ambivalent as I was and said to the salesman, "That's okay, we like it anyway."
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
...what the Ringworld shadow square ropes are made of! Zomg!
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
It's (significantly) harder than diamond implies the scratching goes one way. However, in practice diamond (and perhaps this material as well) have different hardnesses dependent on the orientation of the diamond (or this material).
Has the Rockwell test been accepted for non-natural substances?
Why not? There's probably some peculiar materials for which this hardness test makes little sense (eg, some sort of crumbly ceramic or composite materials like carbon fibre in resin), but most stuff scratches just like its natural counterparts.
Science has yet to create a substance harder than my abs. (Yeah, I don't know where that came from either.. do I even *have* "abs"?)
A gross distortion — about oil. You are basically right about diamonds. While he may overhype matters somewhat, Epstein's classic book documents how the diamond cartel has been ruthless in its limit of supply to a value-sustaining level of marketing-created demand. If supply were to float free, diamonds would drop sharply in price. Furthermore, their intrinsic value within the economy isn't that high-- industrial use mainly. If the US government banned the sale of diamonds for non-industrial uses, DeBeers (and a chunk of the jewelry industry) would collapse, but the overall economy would be OK. Banning the industrial uses would hurt more, and probably trigger a recession, but not a total economic collapse.
Oil, on the other hand, has many uses -- fuel, plastics, fertilizers, and chemical feedstocks probably heading the list. Furthermore, in economic terms, there are NO elasticly substitutable replacements for it, and an exponentially growing demand as China and India become fully industrialized. Since conventional biodiesel relies on petroleum fertilizers and machinery, the "best" elastic replacement is sythetic petroleum from coal, probably becoming competitive in the $120/bbl to $200/bbl range. In the good (?!?) news, this means base (untaxed) gas prices can't do much more than triple from current levels, so we shouldn't go over $10/gallon for gasoline for about 30 years after peak oil (given the vast US coal reserves). The bad news is that the ecologic impacts are higher... which might require higher gas taxes to deal with the impact.
In addition, OPEC (and other cartel) quotas are not the primary limit on supply at this point — although they may be getting rich off it for the moment. Supply today is mainly limited the finite known reserves (with new discoveries having peaked pre-1970), and by current production rate limits (which is why a hurricane in the Gulf caused a price spike of oil to over $70/bbl). OPEC is pretty much pumping as hard as it can now.
Diamond prices are indeed deeply controlled by deliberate supply controls, and there have been times when oil prices were influenced that way, but right now, the price of oil is pure unrestricted supply and demand... where supply is running out.
(Why, yes, I am one of those "Peak Oil" kooks. Pleased ta meetcha.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Shut up, you fool! She'll hear you!
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You must not be much of a Simpsons fan. Just a few Comic Book Guy quotes:
Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
CBG: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere. Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow. (The download is interrupted by a banner advertisement) Hey, what the? Huh, the Internet King. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
(scene changes to Homer's office)
Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?
CBG: I'm interested in upgrading my twenty eight point eight kilobaud internet connection to a one point five megabit fibre-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatable with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?
Homer: (after long pause) Can I have some money now?
and, of course, according to his Wikipedia entry, "Comic Book Guy was once married, in an online fantasy game. He and his Internet wife were thinking of having children, but that would have severely drained his power crystals."
Wow, off-topic *and* I wasted a good 12 minutes of my work time!
Instead they will develop Sinclair molecule chain.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I guess a pretty simple way to put it would be like this:
;-)
butter and ice cream are both essentially different forms of milk, but you don't see people walking around with cones full of butter do you?
If you do, that's pretty gross.
Actually, in all honesty, it's pretty common in advertisements. Even seen a nice, close-up photograph of pretty scoops of vanilla ice cream? Odds are, it's not actually ice cream: it's scoops of lard, made to look like ice cream. Lard doesn't melt nearly as fast, and is easier to photograph.
If you get the chance, talk to a professional photographer who photographs various kinds of "food" for a living sometime: it's quite interesting. Just don't do it over lunch!
--
AC
Just don't try using it to drill through rocket casings of ancient, extra-terrestrial origin. You'll regret it.
Breakfast served all day!
I thought they were talking about my member, the wanker down under, my Howard Johnson, Longjohn Silver, the high hard one, the wang doodle ...
sometimes I think it is harder than diamonds.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
This new material is harder than diamonds but there's nothing to indicate its toughness. Which is important. Diamonds are easy to chip on something tougher because they aren't themselves very tough; they're just hard. To illustrade: Imagine a picture window and a bar of iron. Throw the bar of iron at the window. The window breaks because it is not as tough as the iron bar. But take a peice of the resulting broken glass and you can scrape the iron bar because the glass is harder than the iron.
This is why a jewelry salesperson will panic if you try to scrape a diamond ring on the display glass; it's not the glass they're worried about. The diamond can break doing that if you hit someone else's prior scrape because the glass is tougher than the diamond.
A penis implant with that stuff.
I somehow doubt Michael Vick could rush through that... ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Choose your words wisely, fat guys have big boobs too.
I don't get it.
I prefer large, large... tracts of land, but that's just me.
The question is, will it be deep fat fried next year?
So does this get an 11 on the Mohs scale?
Someone give this guy a wedgie. He remembers how to program in Pascal.
It's too bad; Pascal was a good choice for an instructional language. Straightforward syntax and usable for real-world problems.
I think that the move to Java for introductory programming classes is very depressing. What people wanted was a "safe C", so that beginners didn't have to worry about bizarre misbehavior in their programs. Java, however, is a horrible choice for a teaching language, as it brings an entire raft of crap along with it, including all the OO crap, masses of library code, fat abstraction layers, and so forth. I've seen people take intro programming classes in Java and come out with some vague memories of some Java terminology, but not having learned anything about algorithms or structured thinking because they're busy struggling with all of the nonsense in Java.
The older I get, the more I think that Knuth is right about wanting CS classes to be taught in assembly.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Wikipedia states that diamond has a hardness of "between 167 and 231 gigapascals" while the article says it has a hardness of 442 GPa. Which is correct? Also, currently The Wiki states that "ultrahard fullerite" (with 310 GPa, still lower than the value stated for diamond in the article!) is the hardest material known, and is harder than diamond. So this is at least the second harder-than-diamond material discovered?
I remember the story in New Scientist on a computer program to simulate hardness of crystal structures was let loose and strnagely suggested carbon nitride C3N4 was the hardest. The researchers were checking their program and expected diamond to come up the hardest. It's very hard to make though.
:-)
A search in Google finds a reference here, section 4.11, which shows this happened in 1989. It's nice to know my memory is still working
pithy comment
My nanorod is hard too.
Unfortunately, your nanorod is very, very small.
the prices are kept artificially high by the diamond cartels and their storehouses of stones
11 Harrowhouse (plot summary)
gewg_
Yes, you (Fanblade) and Troon are right, I missed a zero. Goes to show I should have written it with thousands separators: 1 000 000 000. Harder to mess up.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/08/193123 6
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?