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.
The old material was stiffer, not harder, than diamond. It could still be scratched by 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
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.?)...
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?
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
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.
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.