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Easy-to-Make Material Scratches Diamond
holy_calamity writes "A material tough enough to scratch diamond that can be made without resorting to massive pressure has been developed at UCLA. A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium." Sound familiar? This is the other new material tougher than diamond, but no word yet on how they rate against each other.
It's about time!
Now how is the skeletal bonding programing doing?
The old material was stiffer, not harder, than diamond. It could still be scratched by diamond.
That's a funny way to spell dolemite.
Rhenium is very expensive. Pure boron isn't cheap either. This stuff could end up costing as much as diamond.
Sweet.
Diamond is one of the hardest (if not THE hardest) metals known to man!
Due to extensive research done by the Fourchon University of Science, diamond has been confirmed as the the hardest metal known the man. The research is as follows.
Pocket-protected scientists built a wall of iron and crashed a diamond car into it at 400 miles per hour, and the car was unharmed.
They then built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles an out into the wall, and the wall came out fine.
They then crashed a diamond car made of 400 miles per hour into a wall, and there were no survivors.
They crashed 400 miles per hour into a diamond traveling at iron car. Western New York was powerless for hours.
They rammed a wall of metal into a 400 mile per hour made of diamond, and the resulting explosion shifted the earth's orbit 400 million miles away from the sun, saving the earth from a meteor the size of a small Washington suburb that was hurtling towards midwestern Prussia at 400 billion miles per hour.
They shot a diamond made of iron at a car moving at 400 walls per hour, and as a result caused two wayward airplanes to lose track of their bearings, and make a fatal crash with two buildings in downtown New York.
They spun 400 miles at diamond into iron per wall. The results were inconclusive.
Finally, they placed 400 diamonds per hour in front of a car made of wall traveling at miles, and the result proved without a doubt that diamonds were the hardest metal of all time, if not just the hardest metal known the man.
In my last marriage, my ex-'s ring didn't last very long. Six-months to be exact - so diamonds aren't forever. If this new substance can ensure the santity of marriage, I'm all for it!
A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium....Sound familiar?
If this sounds familiar you need to get out more. Seriously.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I for one welcome our new rhenium diboride overlords!
But seriously, its good to see a metal that is tougher than diamond. Though it is prohibitively expensive no doubt, I wonder how it would fare as a bullet?
When keying someone's car isn't enough to say I hate you, make a key out of this material and key their jewelery.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
rhenium diboride is a girls best friend
Sorry to be slightly off topic, but does anyone have the formula for converting libraries of congress to Moh's hardness scale and vice versa?
I just need to be able to explain these new results to my boss on monday, thanks!
Much energy was spent in the comments to the older story (linked from this one) to make clear that it is about "harder", not "tougher". What does CowboyNeal do? Repeat the same mistake twice in the new story. Can CowboyNeal be fired?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
So Diamond is a metal? I guess it is a chain in some cases. Then in answer to your comment, it depends - is it in or out of a marriage?
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
Yes. You wanna make something of it, whelp? Because I have a pair of computer speakers and a receipt from the gas station that will make handy weapons.
Again, we mustn't conflate hardness, stiffness, and toughness!
I've been studying diamond for a while now, and have a fairly prominent webpage about diamond's material properties, and on three separate occasions I have been contacted in the following way:
A budding fantasy author is writing a book in which the protagonist has a sword made out of diamond, "because diamond is the hardest material of all!", and they wanted to run the idea past me first.
So I point out that, despite being very hard (i.e. resistant to indentation), diamond is in fact very brittle (i.e. not very tough), and indeed the very first time that our hero hits something with his diamond sword, it will shatter.
In one case, the author said that I had basically ruined his life by wrecking the whole concept of the book that he had been writing for the last few years. In subsequent emails, he was begging me to come up with a solution (e.g. diamond sword, coated with steel, etc.?)...
Thanks for the information, but the post WAS A JOKE.
Can I put in a song request? I'd like want to hear "Goodbye Beautiful Day" by beat&path—I can't get that song out of my hand.
Thanks.
WTF, UCLA?
Chuck Norris's toe nail clippings?
or tried to eat one of my mother-in-law's biscuits... They are hard enough to scratch any diamond.
.. We need Mohs 2.0?
God Be Gone
Molten Boron!
I change my sig often.
Everyone knows diamond is the strongest of all metals.
The UAW will love this! The latest in ass scratching technology!
o/~ Nobody doesn't like molten boron! o/~
That green slime had it coming.
since rhenium is more costly than platinum.
If it could be incorporated into a matrix of buckytubes, it could be a great laminating material for armor.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Why diamonds are considered to be "one of the hardest substance known to man"? I know it CANNOT be compressed a lot... But it can be cut easily no? How are people cutting diamonds? Do they use knifes of a super-mega-rare substance? If not, can't these knifes be used to scractch diamonds too? Or is it that diamonds can be cut but not scratched?
Since he is a fantasy author, why not make a material up?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
On his scale, this one goes up to 11.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
tell him to make the sword out of rhenium diboride
this is loaner...my sig is in the shop
Rhenium costs £6.50 per gram if you want to buy it on ebay; boron is £13.50 a gram on ebay because the one seller there is selling an exotic crystalline form. [ebay search for 'rhenium metal' or 'boron element']
a mond_powder_price_list.html will sell you twenty grams (a hundred carats) of half-micron diamond dust for fifty dollars which is a lot cheaper than either the rhenium or the boron.
a sp suggests that bulk rhenium is $3000 per pound, which is a bit over half the ebay price above; some sites, I think mostly run by gold bugs, suggest $6000 per troy ounce, so either there's an opportunity for arbitrage, or they've confused rhenium and rhodium.
So making ReB2 using source materials bought in small quantities on ebay would be about ten pounds (about twenty dollars) a gram; probably the cost of the electricity to run the furnace would be more than that, and the depreciation on the furnace more still.
I paid ten Euros (about fifteen dollars) for the diamond sample I have, which is two milligrams, and various diamond-industry sites give prices on the order of a hundred thousand dollars per gram; of course, rather like microchips, diamond pricing is exponential in the size because you have to find one big diamond rather than gluing two small ones together.
But ReB2 will be competing with diamond abrasive, and http://www.diamondtech.com/products/categories/di
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/re/re.
The not-so-trustworthy-looking http://biotsavart.tripod.com/bmt.htm has boron at about $5000 per kilogram, so $2200 per pound; still these are orders of magnitude cheaper than diamond.
> Isn't UCLA the place where that kid got tasered 6 times by a cop?
Shocking!
Man (down on one knee): Honey, will you marry me? Woman: What the hell is that? Man: It's rhenium diboride, more durable than diamond. I wanted to show you just how much I love you, even more than diamond. Woman: Cheap bastard. Come back when you have a diamond.
In one case, the author said that I had basically ruined his life by wrecking the whole concept of the book that he had been writing for the last few years. In subsequent emails, he was begging me to come up with a solution (e.g. diamond sword, coated with steel, etc.?)...
Perhaps the author should consider a hero that scratches the enemy to death. He shall be named "Sir Scratch-a-lot"
Now I can finally scratch all moms jewelry for a few bucks! Yay!
I fear a "will it blend" sub-thread.
Thompson's Teeth - The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth.
See http://www.taxfreegold.co.uk/rheniumpricesusdollar s.html. At the time of this posting the price of one troy ounce of rhenium was $5,950. Gold is $691.60 per troy ounce. So rhenium is over 8 times more expensive than gold, before you even add the costs of further processing. Doesn't seem very economical.
Just the other day, your wife told me that her mom has hard biscuits. I told her that I had something harder. She asked to see and she could prove that it was easier to eat than the biscuits. I told that it was way too hard for me to eat, but that she could. So she did. And she was right. It is now softer.
Some place I've got a sword of slaying. He might want to use that.s -selling-solar.html
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Slice through utility rate increases. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The female geek who for some reason married me insists that any future jewelry be something other than a mined diamond. Preferably something created with human skill and science.
I hope I'm not the only one around here how ever studied the great con artist of history.
In 1905, a Henri Lemoine, 81st Lecourbe St. (Paris), said he could create diamonds using nothing more than his cooking stove and electricity (15000 or 18000 amps, at 110V).
He manage to get about 70000 British Pounds (imagine how much was that in 1905) from Sir Julius Werner (president of Da Beers Corporation).
Even thou this is not related to the article, it did remind me of this fact. Yes, definitively sounds familiar.
Reference: Rolin, Babette: COMMENT ON VOLE SON PROCHAIN ( INVITATION A L'ESCROQUERIE )
Portuguese Title: Como Roubar o Próximo (A quinta Essêcia da Arte de Vender)
I don't think this book ever got an ISBN.
morcego
The sword is made of Diamond 9 and if it touches other diamonds they too become Diamond 9
(Apologies to the late KV).
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Try whacking a pebble of serpentine jade some time with a hammer and see how hard it is to break. Wear eye protection over remaining eye...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Not quite true - one is a very soft almost pure iron and the other is effectively a high carbon white cast iron or a steel too high in carbon to really be useful alone (wootz). Thin layers of both give you a composite material under exactly the same principle as fibreglass (brittle but strong glass + soft plastic gives you a range of properties depending on how much glass goes in).
Apart from the pattern welded (lots of thin layers) core there is also a small section on the blade side of the high carbon material to give a better cutting edge (but it chips easily if it hits anything hard). On the back is soft material which was used to block other swords and dent instead of chip. The technique was never lost despite the ravings of various "in search of" loonies - it's just easier to get materials with similar properties today by other means and the mine that produced the hard "wootz" material ran out.
Pearlite as mentioned above is obtainable from cast steels and gives you effectively a similar structure and strength to something that is pattern welded but it isn't acheivable with an ordinary charcoal fire (while wrought iron and cast irons with a lot of carbon are are - cast steel needs high temperatures). Different cooling rates can give you a wide range of high carbon structures and give you the sort of hard metal carbides in the right shape that are in the "wootz" material. Tempered martensite is the easiest to get - a water quench and then heat up again for a while so it is not so brittle works with a lot of steels. Controlling the cooling rate with insulation (like clay) gives you a lot of other possibilities.
I was going to get my last girlfriend a Titanium band (who doesn't love Titanium?) with one of those awesome blue synthetic diamonds that has the mildly radioactive isotopes in it. She threatened to break up with me if I did. Sigh... geek girls are a tragically rare form of life. Any girl who doesn't appreciate a radioactive gemstone set in a strip of spaceship hull... well, she leaves something to be desired.