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New Material Harder Than Diamond

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the thats-one-gem-thats-hard-to-imagine dept.

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.'"

6 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does that mean.. by kavachameleon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Supply and demand has nothing to do with the diamond market. As I understand it, the prices are kept artificially high by the diamond cartels and their storehouses of stones.

  2. Re:Diamonds =/= Diamonds? by Bananatree3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess it should be better defined. It is talking about two different diamond states. 1) There is the natural, mined diamond you get from the Earth. 2) This artificial, human-created diamond-type substance that is made from diamond. In essense they are both just really hard carbon structures, with different atomic states.

  3. Re:Does that mean.. by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Um, no. Diamonds currently retain value as expensive the same way Oil does. It's controlled by a company who's got overwhelming control over the supply, and thus, can charge any price they want for the goods.

    That being said, synthetic diamonds have been on the market for a while now. In fact, my sister just bought a ring with one in it.

    --
    "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  4. Why are you giving us the modulus? by hopethisnickisnottak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:Does that mean.. by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That is exactly what he means and your girlfriend is correct. The problem is why should they be called anything but diamonds? Synthetic means fake to many people. A man made diamond is a diamond. What the Diamond makers wants are the same rules as the pearl growers have. A pearl is a pearl.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  6. No good instructional computer languages by typical · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.