Slashdot Mirror
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
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
On soviet slashdot, overlords make joke about you!
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.?)...
Wrong. The use of hollow point and similar ammo during times of war is restricted by the Hague convention of 1899, not the Geneva convention. Also note that tumbling and frangible full metal jacket ammo is allowed, such as British mark 7 .303
Military ammo usually lacks quality (b) because it's better to disable an enemy soldier than to kill him, both for the psychological effect at the enemy, who has to watch him suffer; and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting. Oh, and because the Geneva convention says so, they seem to think it's somehow more "humane" to cripple soldiers than to kill them.
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
First: there is no infantry weapons system (other than the "NLW" which are designed for crowd control, not combat) specifically intended to cripple rather than kill an enemy. One shot, one kill, is always the infantryman's goal. The best possible way to remove an enemy soldier from the fight is to kill him; wounded enemies often can and do keep shooting back. The "wounding is better than killing" meme is often repeated among soldiers as well as civilians, but it does not appear anywhere in Army doctrine.
Second: the LOAC's prohibition on "dum-dum" rounds is basically intended to make things easier on military surgeons; it's a matter of what's humane off the battlefield, not on it.
Third: FMJ rounds, as opposed to the wide variety of other types of rounds which would be acceptable under the LOAC, are used primarily for reliability and versatility. Reliability, because rounds with any exposed lead will foul a rifle under typical infantry combat conditions (dirt, mud, sand, and enormous volume of fire between cleanings.) Versatility, because softer rounds are better for use against unarmored human targets, but that's about it. Trying to stop a vehicle with soft-nose rounds? Good luck. And modern body armor is very very good, but you've still got a good chance of getting through it with a dead-on shot from a rifle of decent caliber if you're using FMJ; soft-nose will just go splat.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Chuck Norris's toe nail clippings?
No matter how much (a) it has, if it is hard enough, it will strip the rifling grooves right out of the barrel, and won't hit worth crap. A bullet isn't supposed to be hard. Unless we're talking about the Penetrator of a Discarding Sabot round.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
No, but now it goes to eleven. It's one harder.
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
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
So do I. There are still other reasons it's dumb.
First, the argument goes, as stated by the parent poster, that "and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting." Except they won't. Troops aren't trained to put down their guns and stop fighting back to rescue wounded. The other argument goes that it ties up the other guy's resources in getting him to a hospital, fixing him, caring for him, and so forth. But that only matters if *you* lose the battle. If you *win*, you're now in possession of all those wounded, and now *you* have to care for them. Then there's the fact that there are all sorts of wounds that allow the wounded to not only keep fighting, but to return to the front to fight again after some medical care.
It's a dumb myth.
We tried to kill the myth, sergeant, but apparently our bullets could only cripple it.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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.
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.
Actually, pure-lead rounds won't strip the riflings, that type of heat will melt the lead and make it clog the riflings up. I made that mistake with my dad's AR-15 (I filed the metal jacketing off and used a dremel to cross-point the lead core for a hollow-point effect..) Two shots and one misfire later, the gun's barrel was fucked, clogged with lead.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Now I can finally scratch all moms jewelry for a few bucks! Yay!
One shot, one kill, is always the infantryman's goal. The best possible way to remove an enemy soldier from the fight is to kill him; wounded enemies often can and do keep shooting back. The "wounding is better than killing" meme is often repeated among soldiers as well as civilians, but it does not appear anywhere in Army doctrine.
I have a military training (Finnish Defence Forces, conscript not professional). Though I'm not sure if it's an official doctrine, wounding an enemy soldier is often a good way to disable more than one enemy fighters. In fact during infantry training we were told that we should aim for the belly. This will, in most cases, disable the enemy and tie a larger number of support personnel and strain the enemy logistics. Only in movies, soldiers continue shooting like madmen after being shot in the belly.
I have also a medical corps man training and I know that the enemy will try to strain the medical logistics and other support units in a conflict. Breaking the support chain, of course also by killing, but especially by wounding a lot of soldiers is a fastest way to deplete supply and restrict mobility. In a symmetrical conflict, where both sides have field armies it is a more logical _strategy_ to wound as often as possible as this will strain enemy's resources also behind the front.
I don't know that much about asymmetrical combat (like the one we see in Iraq), I'll leave that to all the wannabe experts out there.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
As another reply to your post pointed out, the reason to "shoot for the belly" is not to wound (vs. kill) the target, it's because by aiming for the "center of mass" you have the best chance of actually hitting your target. Snipers can go for the fancy head shots; regular grunts in the middle of a firefight don't have the time. And gut wounds are very often fatal.
Only in movies, soldiers continue shooting like madmen after being shot in the belly.
I have personally seen people with horrific wounds continue to fight.
I have also a medical corps man training and I know that the enemy will try to strain the medical logistics and other support units in a conflict.
Any combat will strain medical logistics, with or without a deliberate "shoot to wound" policy. Overall, "shoot to wound" would probably create less strain on logistics because if you're not trying to shoot to kill, you're much less likely not to hit your target at all. Any army which tried not to kill its opponents would find it itself at an enormous disadvantage on the battlefield against any army which tried (as in fact all armies do) to kill as many as possible; what the medics are doing is irrelavant if the infantrymen fail to accomplish their mission. And I speak as someone who's done both jobs -- I liked being a medic a lot more than I liked being a grunt, but the simple fact is that medics don't win wars.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The civilised world (not including the USA) has banned the use of mines of this type, due to the fact that they are very likely to cause large numbers of civilian casualties.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News