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Uncategorized Friday, August 17th 2012 at 8:36 am

New Super Hard Form of Carbon Discovered Can Dent Diamonds

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Move over, diamonds — there’s a new toughest form of carbon in the world. A new form of the element that blends both crystalline and chaotic structures has been created by researchers at the Carnegie Institution, and it’s so durable it can put a dent in the former world’s hardest substance and automatic relationship apologizer.

Carbon is one of the most common elements in the known universe, and it comes in a wide variety of forms, from pencil lead and charcoal, to graphene and diamonds. To make a harder-than-diamond form of the element, the Carnegie team built a structure called carbon-60 from buckyball-style carbon spheres. They connected these spheres, filling the gaps with the solvent xylene, and then started doing what you do when you want to make something stronger — applying pressure.

Under incredible stresses — about 320,000 times greater than Earth’s normal atmospheric pressure — some of those carbon spheres began collapsing into clusters of carbon atoms, while others maintained their structure, creating a super strong lattice formation. The result is a never-before-seen form of carbon that combines ordered and disordered structures. It’s the first time this combination has been seen, though mineralogists have theorized that such structures are possible.

Researchers know the substance, which has yet to be formally named, is harder than diamonds the same way you know your floor is harder than a dinner plate. When the two come into contact, your floor wins — similarly, when the new carbon form was created, it made a dent in the diamond anvil researchers were working with to create it, which we’re putting down in the loss column for diamonds.

Don’t worry, though, diamonds. We still like you, and will still purchase you on a market so rigged and hopeless you just have to laugh about its markups that strain the bounds of credulity. Because otherwise we might be faced with the prospect of finding a novel, individual, and meaningful way of expressing our love for another person, and man, that just reeks of so much effort that we’re already tired from thinking about it.

(via ScienceDaily)

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  • http://emilyhasbooks.com/ Emily Dietle

    It’s time to recalibrate the Mohs scale!

  • Ren

    I vote we call it vibranium.

  • http://blog.coatesism.com/ Shaun M Coates

    Can Superman make it in the palm of his hand?

  • Anonymous

    What? Adamantium is taken?

  • Diamond Cutter

    Before you fall victim to the “incredible markup” in gem diamonds BS, you should take a degree in finance and figure out how many billions of dollars it takes to open a diamond mine.  Then look at how the diamond market has changed from the days decades ago when DeBeers controlled the market to today where prices are set in a manner that it isn’t terribly different from the way stocks are priced.  
         Regarding diamond mining: take Ekati for example.  Just to get it open, before producing one truck load of ore that contained cuttable diamonds, they spent almost 2 billion dollars.  The mine costs right at a million dollars a day to run, and because of the cold the equipment has to be kept running 24 hours a day & 365.25 days a year.
         Now using your degree in finance, figure out how you are going to pay those billions back, provide for the running of the mine, and provide for a 7% return on their money to the stockholders.   
         And none of that produces a diamond that somebody would wear.  
         Somewhere around 95% or higher of the diamonds recovered are industrial and worth about 5% or so of what the total value of the production is.  That means that the small percentage of diamonds that can be cut have to carry virtually all the burden of the billions of dollars it takes to get them.
         After they are sold into the diamond trade the amount of skill and capital it takes to purchase the rough diamonds and manufacture them into something that you would wear is a business that has such incredibly slim margins that very few banks will finance diamond cutters.
         Curiously, with the exception of the dealers in the diamonds that are truly rare or the merchants like the department stores in the malls who are really just credit card sellers, any diamond merchant that has a sizable amount of sales to consumers is selling diamonds at narrower margins than Blue Nile.  If they have much higher margins, they either aren’t selling, or they are dealing in the truly rare diamonds that 97% of Americans won’t buy.
         The truth is that the diamond market is worldwide.  The American consumer no longer enjoys the position of being the only major buyer of diamonds like they were in 1965 who only competed with themselves.  Today, there are many nations with burgeoning middle and upper classes that are buying diamonds that didn’t in days gone by. Today, the price of diamonds is determined by market forces that are identical to any other item that is desired by a large segment of the world population.
         My company is a prime example. 25 years ago we bought from the DeBeers empire like most everybody else.  We sold to US firms almost exclusively.  Today we buy from several sources, none of which is DeBeers.   We sell in 13 countries, 40% of our volume is to other diamond merchants, manufacturers, or retailers.
        Yes, that means that 60% of our sales are to consumers.  Please realize that the US consumer only buys approximately a third of our consumer production with the consumers in the other 12 countries buying the rest.
         Simply put: The American consumer no longer drives the bus.

  • Anonymous

    The American consumer has never “driven the bus” as you put it. They’ve been lead around by the nose the entire time.

  • Anonymous

    But is it purty?

  • Orphic Mysteries

    Actually a glass or ceramic dish is HARDER than most floors (except a ceramic dish on ceramic tile) or even steel. The dish is just brittle, not tough.