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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.
How long til I can get me a ring of this shit?
my dick is harder than diamonds when i look at pictures of sexy asian chicks!
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.
Is it harder than Dragonforce? The hardest metal known to man.
RPGers around the world had known this for years: a meteorite sword is better than a diamond sword.
but "naturally occurring" and "found in a meteorite fragment" tend to be mutually exclusive terms in my book.
So diamond is no longer the hardest metal known to man?
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
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.
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!
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Materials Science Feed @ Feed Distiller
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.
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.
>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.
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?
"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.
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
Yes, it's Superdiamond - strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal diamonds.
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..
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.
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
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.