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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."
I wouldn't bother. It turns out that it's less expensive than a diamond, so women won't be as happy with it.
A much better name for this stuff would be "carbonite", obviously.
I am officially gone from
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.
Uhm, what do you think a fucking diamond is? Chopped liver? No. Chicken dinner? No. Random collections of carbon atoms in no particular order? No. It's a crystal. Of carbon. Crystalline carbon.
BUT WAIT!! -- There's more! What about pencil lead!? Wow-it, too, is a form of cabon? In a crystal lattice?
Idiot science reporters should go back to covering the MTV music awards.
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.
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