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.

Comments

Re:Price

[asuffield]

Rhenium is very expensive. Pure boron isn't cheap either. This stuff could end up costing as much as diamond.

Almost anything useful costs more than diamond. Of the materials used in industry today, diamond falls firmly into the "common and cheap" section. Subject anything with carbon in it to the temperatures and pressures common in geology, and you end up with diamond in it somewhere.

Those prices you see in jewellers? They are on the order of a thousand times larger than the actual value of diamond. Some of that pays for the expertise to cut diamonds into decorative shapes (which isn't easy), most of it is just an insanely huge markup.

We don't have a need for cheaper alternatives to diamond - it would be like searching for a cheaper alternative to sea water. Most likely the whole diamond angle is just a bogus press spin on the story.