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Harder-Than-Diamond Natural Carbon Crystals Found
HikingStick tips a piece from the science desk at MSNBC.com about a new, naturally occurring form of carbon found in a meteorite fragment. "Researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971. When they then studied the polished surface they discovered carbon-loaded spots that were raised well above the rest of the surface — suggesting that these areas were harder than the diamonds used in the polishing paste... [G]raphite layers were shocked and heated enough to create bonds between the layers — which is exactly how humans manufacture diamonds... [The research] team took the next step and put the diamond-resistant crystals under the scrutiny of some very rigorous mineralogical analyzing instruments to learn how its atoms are lined up. That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new 'phase' or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now."
... is why human-made diamonds, made the same way as that carbon-rich rock was discovered, are not harder than natural diamonds - at least, the summary seems to imply this. If it's graphite in both cases, then shouldn't both be harder than diamonds?
Pics or it didn't happen. I'll take smiles, but I won't like it.
That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new 'phase' or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now.
"Polymorphs of crystalline carbon are forever."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0612-mystery_diamonds.htm
There is a remote possibility that it was not nature to create that structure...
And so a remnance of my empire once vast and impenetrable falls from the sky. Damn you Flash Gordon. Eventually I will get off this rock.
All rites reversed 2010
Now it goes all the way to 11.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Finally, the crystal I needed for my lightsaber! :D
Sometimes, the answer is to just destroy it all.
RPGers around the world had known this for years: a meteorite sword is better than a diamond sword.
...do you think that the meteorite was made by magicians?
Space is natural too.
So diamond is no longer the hardest metal known to man?
You must have limited knowledge of metal then.... Fast != hard
I wouldn't bother. It turns out that it's less expensive than a diamond, so women won't be as happy with it.
Diamond isn't a metal.
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
The article mentions hexagonal diamond (lonsdaleite) as an artificial form of diamond, which it is with a very interesting low energy formation method, but it was first found in nature in the Canyon Diablo Meteorite in 1967. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonsdaleite Pure lonsdaleite should be harder than regular diamond. I wish the article has said a little more about the crystal structure the researchers had found. That the energy required to make lonsdalite is low has interesting implications since the quantity needed to replace structural steel needs only about 1/280 of the energy needed to make the steel. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html
As is magic, only rarer.
"Good news, everyone!"
Unless its death metal
I wouldn't bother. It turns out that it's less expensive than a diamond, so women won't be as happy with it.
less expensive...
this is the only deposit ever found.
and it cam eof a meteor..
you want to bet it's more expensive?
One can also make diamonds harder by isolating and using heavier isotopes. A diamond of purified carbon-13 is harder than a mix of 12,13,14. Man-made diamonds can actually be harder than naturally occurring ones.
I wouldn't bother. It turns out that it's less expensive than a diamond, so women won't be as happy with it.
Give DeBeers a few years and then see.
Now, I realize that the article is talking about a crystalline structure for carbon, so buckyballs clearly don't really figure into this directly, but I wonder if you could break a buckyball on one of these new-fangled space diamonds they seem so happy about. Whatever the case may be, at least Kobe can still take a step up from his previous apology to his wife. Better get back to cheating as quick as possible!
---
Materials Science Feed @ Feed Distiller
How long til I can get me a ring of this shit?
Why do you call it shit? It comes from a meteorite, not from Uranus!
Women are only that way because men are ever scheming to hit-and-run their womb space. Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
That we use diamonds for this purpose is a benefit to the man, because DeBeers has made sure that there is no resale market. If there was a resale market that offered even 50% value, then the man would first need an un-fake-able signal of the woman's seriousness before passing the rock across the table.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
the gayest metal known to man you mean
... is harder than Uranus.
De Beers doesn't have a monopoly now; it's an urban legend. They do control about 50% of the diamond market currently, down from past years, but they are not a monopoly. It's still a popular myth though.
How can I get a ring of this shit?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
From the article: "...artificial ultra-hard diamonds known as lonsdaleite and boron nitride..."
Boron nitride is, of course, not a form of diamond (lonsdaleite is).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
i think he meant mutually inclusive
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
>Researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971
then...
>but had never been found in nature until now
Well if it fell from the sky, then it is not in nature now is it...?
The story is interesting that we might have a new element on our chart or that we may have new improved harder cutting instruments
however, I still think that if we find something in the sense that it came from outer space and fell down to earth, that we should call it what it is, NOT NATURAL.
Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
It's more than just expensiveness. Some years ago, I bought some earrings for my girlfriend which were handmade and embedded with a sapphire, a ruby and a tourmaline. Beautiful, and after negotiating, I still paid the full price because I just wanted. She says thanks, then continues to almost never wear it!
Looking back, I would have made her much happier with some stupid cheaper, mass-produced but diamond-studded earrings...
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Since there is no such thing harder than diamonds on earth, and we cannot create anything harder, then it must have been aliens who sent us the meteorite with a substance so hard that it would...
1- Make it to us through space
2-have encoded within it their history
3- then to be lost when we started grinding away on the bloody thing.
-tom cruise.
I wasn't defending De Beers. They have engaged in 'business practices' that are akin to that of organized crime. I was simply pointing out that they are not a monopoly. Reading comprehension is important and you need more practice.
Dilithium cristals! Yeah! Woohoo!
Now where is that matter-antimatter reaction we need?
Yeah, I know. You got this thing wrong though. Whether someone will like a gift or not always has a certain amount of randomness associated with it. No point beating yourself up if the gift wasn't received with as much enthusiasm as you would have wanted.
It is also not a function of price, color, etc. Sure, if the gift is situational or has a special meaning, the probability of gleeful acceptance will be higher. Nonetheless, remember, it is still a probability, not certainty. The corollary to your statement is also not to start buying cheap stuff for your girlfriend. Acceptance is the only meager answer I can come up with. and hey, this works both ways too. What if your girlfriend got you an iPad and you hated Apple products? Not too different from rubies vs diamonds, is it?
I think you mean speed metal.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You have some great ideas.
What if your girlfriend got you an iPad
Will you marry me? :D
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
"suggesting that these areas were harder than the diamonds used in the polishing paste" is a fundamental misunderstanding and not the basis for a popularist msnbc "harder than diamonds" conjecture. if regions stand proud, it simply means they're harder than the substrate, not that they're particularly hard.
For those that are interested in considering scientific paper without the media filter:
Ferroir, Tristan, Leonid Dubrovinsky, Ahmed El Goresy, Alexandre Simionovici, Tomoki Nakamura, and Philippe Gillet. 2010. Carbon polymorphism in shocked meteorites: Evidence for new natural ultrahard phases. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 290, no. 1-2: 150-154. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2009.12.015. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0012821X09007389.
I sure wish that secondary sources properly cited primary sources, even if they are only interviewing the main scientist involved. Giving the journal name and date as Discovery News did is a good step, though.
-Drache Kubisuro
I have to warn, however, that if you do not have access to the journal Earth & Planetary Science Letters on your campus, organization, or local library, you will hit a pay-wall.
-Drache Kubisuro
I need to make a minor adjustment to my Mohs scale.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
found here
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4Y4XCTH-3&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F15%2F2010&_rdoc=18&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%235801%232010%23997099998%231609118%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=5801&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=26&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ae24ceb289eae1dcc9bc6870f3192dc2
And this is the abstract A slice of the Haverö meteorite which belongs to the ureilite class known to contain graphite and diamond was cut and then polished as a thin section using a diamond paste. We identified two carbonaceous areas which were standing out by more than 10 m in relief over the surface of the silicate matrix suggesting that the carbonaceous phases were not easily polishable by a diamond paste and would therefore imply larger polishing hardness. These areas were investigated by reflected light microscopy, high-resolution Field Emission SEM (FESEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and were subsequently extracted for in situ synchrotron microbeam X-ray fluorescence (XRF), imaging and X-ray diffraction (XRD). We report here the natural occurrences of one new ultrahard rhombohedral carbon polymorph of the R3m space group which structure is very close to diamond but with a partial occupancy of some of the carbon sites. We also report the natural occurrence of the theoretically predicted 21R diamond polytype with lattice parameters very close to what has been modelized. These findings are of great interests for better understanding the world of carbon polymorphs and diamond polytypes giving new natural materials to investigate. These natural samples demonstrate that the carbon system is even more complex than what is currently thought based on ab initio static lattice calculations and high-pressure experiments since this new ultrahard polymorph has never been predicted nor synthesized.
What the article fails to mention is that no one noticed how hard it was until the hot intern started to polish it.
When I was looking for an engagement ring, I brought up the idea of getting a mixed ruby/diamond engagement ring for my fiance with my family. It was pretty much unanimous that, in no circumstances, should I get anything other than diamonds. Part of it was that everyone likes diamonds, but other stones are hit and miss. The other part was that girls like to show off the ring to other girls and diamonds have more bragging power I guess...
Hm, I think an experiment involving replacing your lotion with a diamond polishing paste would put the lie to your boast!
The enemies of Democracy are
If the headline was about a musician granting an interview, and the sub-header was "Famous performer never interviewed before", you wouldn't be scoffing "What? You mean no famous performer has ever been interviewed? Well I have a thousand back issues of Rolling Stone that would disagree!"
What they're saying is that they have discovered a crystalline carbon, and it is something never seen in nature before. The sentence is accurate.
Yes the truncated verbal style often used in headlines may have made it less clear than it could have been by the simple expedient of adding "This".
Nevertheless, this is a perfect example of why I find pedantry to be so useless outside of technical fields where precise meanings not only exist but are required. Because more often than not, pedantry is just a way to fail to understand what is being said.
The enemies of Democracy are
How long til I can get me a ring of this shit?
It depends on several things but mostly on
then the man would first need an un-fake-able signal of the woman's seriousness before passing the rock across the table.
I don't see why this isn't reasonable, even now. Or are men the only ones who lie, cheat, and/or get married for the wrong reasons?
Wow, I hope I'm never stuck with someone so superficial they need me to buy them a hunk of material to judge how serious I am about them.
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
I don't see why that would be necessary. Once you have kids, you've got something much bigger than worthless rocks in common to hold you together. If she leaves you then, well, you accomplished the evolutionary purpose of producing children AND you're free to make some more with someone else.
Everyone has different tastes. You ought to get people presents they like rather than something you like.
Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
Like, say, buying agricultural tools or other infrastructure for starving Elbonians, or donating a wack of money in her name to a medical research program, or supporting an AIDs hospice...
I don't actually buy your faux-evolutionary argument, which only makes what little sense it does in the context of nuclear families, which aren't at all the norm in our evolutionary past. But in any case it fails to explain why women are so utterly and brutally selfish and uncaring about anyone's needs but their own in this process.
Charity also has no resale value, and it would do far more good in the world than pretty rocks.
So I seriously suggest that men present to the woman they want to marry proof of their economic prowess by donating two or three months salary in her name to a charity they know to be important to her. This has two important effects: it increases the resources available to people at the bottom of the food chain, and it reveals those cases where the man is in love with a gold-digging bitch who doesn't give a shit about anyone to the extent that she'd rather have an expensive but useless pretty rock than see others far worse off than herself helped out.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Yes, it's Superdiamond - strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal diamonds.
Find a geek girl that doesn't like jewelry, flowers, or perfume; just chocolate and beer. Now, if only I could get her interested in single malts. She claims all whiskies are nasty. *Sigh*
I drank what? -- Socrates
If she leaves you then, well, you accomplished the evolutionary purpose of producing children AND you're free to make some more with someone else.
You obviously don't understand how divorce works.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Whew. For a moment there, I was fearing I'd hafta buy her meteorite diamonds instead. You saved me, man.
Find a geek girl that doesn't like jewelry, flowers, or perfume; just chocolate and beer. Now, if only I could get her interested in single malts. She claims all whiskies are nasty. *Sigh*
What makes this hard is that I'd need to find one that doesn't also have the same figure as many of the male geeks I know.
This is only partly true. Girls really will snub each other if they get jewelry with gems that aren't diamonds. Because of that, they tend to not appreciate jewelry *unless* it has diamonds.
For example, I bought my girlfriend a very nice and expensive hand made turquoise necklace from a dealer friend in Wyoming. The piece was very unique, and the turquoise was exceptional and a rare color (looked nothing like that synthetic turquoise color).
Her room mate got a cheap pair of sand grain sized diamond earrings from her boyfriend.
While my girlfriend loved her gift partly because she knew the amount of effort I put in to finding it, when she got back to school, her room mate made the comment, "Oh... you didn't get diamonds like I did? That sucks, I'm sorry." in a pretentious way.
Yea, that's what advertising campaigns can do to women. What sucks more is that we have to play that stupid game to make them happy.
Yes. How awful of us men to want women to sacrifice a half hour of their time whereas women just want us to sacrifice the rest of our lives.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Yes, you can measure them in blood spilled: http://www.amnestyusa.org/amnestynow/diamonds.html
This new type of diamond shall henceforth be known as 'unobtanium' Hey maybe we can mine this stuff..
I think you're misunderstanding the primary biological function of the womb...
Yep, you're totally right. Otherwise, it'll just be wasted money (as was the case).
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Viable alternatives are a better girlfriend or moissanite instead of diamond. I've read that the appearance of moissanite is superior to diamond, but indistinguishable to anyone but an expert.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This is fucking brilliant chap.
Good show.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
That is ridiculous for so many reasons I don't even know where to start. Engagement rings are not some sort of "un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness". If either the man or the woman calls off the wedding for any reason, in many states, legally, the ring is returned to the man.
In some states of the United States, engagement rings are considered "conditional gifts" under the legal rules of property. This is an exception to the general rule that gifts cannot be revoked once properly given. See, for example, the case of Meyer v. Mitnick, 625 N.W.2d 136 (Michigan, 2001), whose ruling found the following reasoning persuasive: "the so-called 'modern trend' holds that because an engagement ring is an inherently conditional gift, once the engagement has been broken, the ring should be returned to the donor. Thus, the question of who broke the engagement and why, or who was 'at fault,' is irrelevant. This is the no-fault line of cases."
And some info on the history of engagement rings. Note that the rings were initially made out of iron (pretty inexpensive).
Romans used iron rings to symbolize strength and permanence, and the Greeks are credited with the initial idea to wear the ring on the fourth finger of the left hand, where the “vena amoris” or vein of love was supposed to connect to the heart.
During the ninth century, Pope Nicolas I endorsed the idea of engagement rings by making a gold ring a betrothal requirement to demonstrate the groom’s wealth and ability to care for a wife. In 1215, Pope Innocent III made a similar declaration though the rings could consist of different metals, including silver and iron, and the rings were meant to be worn during a longer engagement period.
I'll leave the part about how DeBeers controlling the resale market is good for men (or anyone) for someone else to debunk.
Honest question here: What does putting the first letter in brackets mean?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Comparison with glass is a very good comparison. Both materials are very brittle due to the way atoms are very tightly packed in with little room to move, unlike a crystal of iron for example.
If you look at anything under the microscope you will see scratches and imperfections so the "easily scratched" confusion is irrelevent - everything is already scratched to an extent, so you have surface flaws. These have a very major effect on brittle materials. Think of how you can cut glass simply by scratching it and then trying to bend the glass at the scratch. There are also internal flaws of various sizes. With very brittle materials even a mismatch in the crystal structure of the size of a single layer of atoms has a major effect - this type of flaw is know as a "dislocation". Flaws that size are enough to reduce the tensile strength of brittle materials to much less than the compressive strength.
In general terms hard brittle materials are used in compression because they are no good in tension. A diamond I-beam would not work while a diamond bridge arch would. A diamond box girder would probably work as well since the idea is to keep the brittle material in compression so you can build a bridge out of it. It would probably also be good as a surface coating to resist wear in situations where abrasion is expected, diamond is already coated on surfaces via chemical vapour deposition for that purpose.
Women are "that way" because they are not enough REAL MEN to go around who actually excite them and who have enough self-worth that they don't feel that they have to buy a woman's attention. Real men are stalked and pursued by women who wouldn't mind not having a diamond; they just want a REAL MAN. Some women would demand things like diamonds when they sense that the man has less self-worth than the woman, and they exploit that insecurity. This "problem" never happens to real men who know how to handle women.
I'll assume by your silence you concede all points.
This news and many applications of diamonds were outlined in the show Naked Science: Super Diamonds.
Check it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6zKVlROuBs
No true Scotsman.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Are you really so misguided as to think that really matters here when we are talking about something that is several orders of magnitude more brittle than steel or are you deliberately pretending to miss the point to win some sort of game?
If you are serious then look up it yourself, read what the value represents, look at the units connected with the "number" and and you will understand.
Once again for a deliberate slow learner that is only doing this out of spite, if you don't know what the numbers mean then it is f*ing obvious that a bit of pointless numerology is going to get you nowhere.
As for building flaws in by "my" method - the definition of toughness is incredibly basic materials science as observed and taught for hundreds of years and a major way of characterising materials for hundreds of years. If you drag out your old lecture notes you were probably told about it in a first year physics subject.
So here's my challenge to you - improve yourself so that you know more than the AC above that you "corrected" with an insult and an error. Apply reason and not "magical thinking". It was amusing that you were accusing every materials scientist and every engineer of "magical thinking" in comparison with some of your rather odd assumptions above that unfortunately do not fit very well with reality.