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Scientists Turn Tequila Into Diamonds
MaxwellEdison writes "Researchers, oddly enough from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, have found a way to make diamond films using tequila. They were originally testing methods of creating the films with organic solutions like acetone when it was noticed the ideal ratios of water and ethanol turned out to be about 80 proof, or 40% alcohol. '"To dissipate any doubts, one morning on the way to the lab I bought a pocket-size bottle of cheap white tequila and we did some tests," Apátiga said. "We were in doubt over whether the great amount of chemicals present in tequila, other than water and ethanol, would contaminate or obstruct the process, it turned out to be not so. The results were amazing, same as with the ethanol and water compound, we obtained almost spherical shaped diamonds of nanometric size. There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds."'"
Diamonds make girls easier to sleep with; tequila makes girls easier to sleep with. We really should have seen this earlier.
Drinking too much of the tequilla beforehand might impact the observations.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
a project with lots of Tequila involved.
This is good news. Shortly, you'll be able to use the same substance that got you into this mess, for the ring.
But now we'll have to protect these scientists, as well as tequila factories, lest DeBeers have them assassinated.
just like with using ethanol with food, how's this going to affect being an alcoholic?
As much tequila as I've put away in the past, I'm thinking I should have examined more closely the output from a recent bout with kidney stones...
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
There goes the price of Tequila....
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
I've been doing the reverse for years. I'm not even a scientist.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Once again, eggheads and their muddled brains. Ask yourself: Is that a good thing?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- Ben Franklin
"Tequila is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy and rich" -- Jose Cuervo Sauza-Patron
Is that a Rolex?
No, it's an Anejo, you insensitive clod!
Just got caught with the tequila at work, and had to come up with an excuse quickly.
Umm... we're... um... um... trying to make diamond nanospheres with it! Yeah, diamond nanospheres! That's the ticket.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Uh, I'm not sure I follow your logic there, even though I agree with the end result. TFA points out they had discovered this by using ethanol and water mixed. They made mixes from pure alchohol and water, it was only after they found the ideal ratio that someone realized it was the same as tequilla. Had prohibition been going on, they would have discovered the real money making part: the ratio of water to alchohol needed to make diamonds.
Interestingly, most labs that use ethanol for things like sterilization get most of it not in the form of pure ethanol but 70% ethanol. There seem to be two causes for that in the US, one is of course that higher-purity ethanol is harder to make, I'm not sure what goes into getting 100% ethanol, but I've heard you can't distill it that pure. The other is that the 70% stock is usually denatured, it often has methanol added. The addition of methanol makes it undrinkable (er, well you could drink it, but you'd go blind and die if you drank enough of it) and also makes it taxed less.
I wonder if these guys weren't trying to cut down on laboratory costs, maybe methanol reduces the efficiency (ruling out the denatured alchohol), but the non-methanol contaminants in tequilla don't. Maybe tequilla is a lot cheaper than even denatured alchohol in Mexico.
I have personally turned tequila into many things. Including vomit and diarrhea.
How's 200 bottles of Tequila going to look on my next grant application?
It's hard to get 100% pure ethanol because ethanol is hygroscopic. This is part of the problem with using pure ethanol in vehicles (water ends up in your fuel without proper precautions), and why butanol may be a better choice for fuel.
Also, I'm not sure why nobody's mentioned it, but vodka is about the closest you can get to a 60%-40% water/ethanol mixture. Very few if any extra chemicals. Why use tequila instead of vodka?
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
In simple distillation it is impossible to get 100% ethanol. The highest purity you can get is 95.6% ethanol and 4.4% water because ethanol/water is an azeotrope. There are several ways to get pure ethanol, one of which is to add compounds like benzene which makes it unsuitable for human consumption.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Because the research was done at UNAM. And the only thing worse than cheap Mexican tequila is cheap Mexican vodka. Even the worms refuse to drown in it.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
is there nothing you can't do? From creating diamonds to making me forget my freshman (and most of my sophomore)year at college.
Good Times,good times...
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Why would anyone waste good tequila on rocks? Call me back when someone can turn cheap beer into tequila.
Possibly related to that, water and alcohol form an azeotropic mixture. In practice this mixture (of about 95%alcohol and 5% water) is the closest to pure ethanol you can achieve through distillation.
You have to scroll down pretty far to find it, so...
Professor: "Your supposed to be working on bourbon in the nano-rocks not bourbon on the rocks!"
GA: "We had to adjust the alcohol to water ratio, so we are slowly melting ice into the bourbon with frequent ratio checks."
Professor: "OK, carry on. Oh, and give me one for sampling purposes."
"vodka is proof god hates us and wants us to die."
--american dude morning after drinking with russians
Only in Mexico would you use the words "scientist" and "cheap tequila" in the same article.
Sigs? We don't need no steekin Sigs!
That's kind of like skydivers' responses to the "why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" jokes - "have you seen the airplanes we're jumping out of?".
A few years back I was in Mazatlan with friends, and checked out tequilas in the local liquor store. The range of selections explained why one of the local restaurants was pouring the stuff like water - the cheap stuff was about $5/gallon. If you wanted Cazadores or drinks at a fancy bar, you still had to pay real money, but if you wanted ethanol that had been aged in plastic for no more than 15 minutes, and didn't have to pay US-level or Europe-level alcohol taxes, it doesn't actually cost that much to make.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The reason 70% is used is because purer alcohols dehydrates the bacteria and causes them to go into a sporuative phase and more difficult to kill. Ethanol, EtOH is sometimes denatured with methanol and sometime with other alkanes like heptane. EtOH typically comes out of the still at 190 proof or 95%, if memory serves me correctly you can get it up to 98% with additional treatment but it's expensive.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
but this is the first informative I read in this thread.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
...you Crazy Mexicans
You will never find a bottle of Tequila with a worm in it
I beg to differ. I put a worm in a bottle of Tequila then put it in my fridge. My parents promptly found it.
What are the applications?
I know a metallurgist who has developed a cheap method of growing diamond onto ferrous surfaces. Is this a possible method for growing diamond on non-ferrous surfaces?
I know there are a lot of jokes floating around here, but could the applications be useful? Can we grow diamond ball-bearings or something? Ideas?
Come on, this is Slashdot. We joke around, but SOMEBODY must know some uses for this idea.
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Can't you club the rubber seals? ;)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
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