New Material Harder Than Diamond

h4x0r-3l337 writes "Diamond is no longer the hardest substance known to man. Scientists have created a new material, called "aggregated diamond nanorods" by compressing carbon-60 under high heat. From the article: 'The hardness of a material is measured by its isothermal bulk modulus. Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond.'"

Diamonds =/= Diamonds?

[kavachameleon]

Forgive my ignorance after Reading TFA... but this "harder than diamond" material is... made of diamonds! Seems like false advertising, though I get what they did.

Re:Does that mean..

[kavachameleon]

Supply and demand has nothing to do with the diamond market. As I understand it, the prices are kept artificially high by the diamond cartels and their storehouses of stones.

Re:Diamonds =/= Diamonds?

[Bananatree3]

I guess it should be better defined. It is talking about two different diamond states. 1) There is the natural, mined diamond you get from the Earth. 2) This artificial, human-created diamond-type substance that is made from diamond. In essense they are both just really hard carbon structures, with different atomic states.

Re:Does that mean..

[ciroknight]

Um, no. Diamonds currently retain value as expensive the same way Oil does. It's controlled by a company who's got overwhelming control over the supply, and thus, can charge any price they want for the goods.

That being said, synthetic diamonds have been on the market for a while now. In fact, my sister just bought a ring with one in it.

To all the posters making jokes about thier wives

[Anonymous Coward]

Why'd you marry such shallow, pathetic women?

Why are you giving us the modulus?

[hopethisnickisnottak]

It is, after all, a measure of strength in compression, which is completely different from hardness.

How about giving us figures for hardness? Like the Brinell Hardness Number or the results of the Rockwell hardness test?

Re:Diamonds =/= Diamonds?

[saskboy]

Coal and graphite are also made from diamond material, carbon. It's the final structure that counts, and it isn't structured like a diamond, or it would have the hardness of one.

Naming

[shut_up_man]

Aggregated diamond nanorods is a bit of a mouthful... shall we call it Adinar? Agdian? Xena? Buffy?

Oh Moh!!

[craznar]

The old scale is broken.

Re:Does that mean..

[DeafByBeheading]

"Now they are trying to quash synthetic diamonds by getting trade regulators to force synthetic fabricators [to market their] diamonds as something other than [diamonds]."

I'm guessing that's sort of what you meant, right? That's interesting, because my girlfriend wrote a linguistics term paper last spring about how synthetic diamond manufacturers need to call their product something more appealing than "synthetic" (a word which doesn't exactly have glamorous connotations). It would suck for them if they finally realized they shouldn't call their product "synthetic" but were quickly forbidden to use the word "diamonds" in the first place.

Re:Possible uses?

[Wills]

"Synthetic diamond" is not an oxymoron; it simply means diamond that has been synthesised by an artificial process, rather than by a naturally occurring process.

Re:Possible uses?

[bmo]

And that's why I prefer "manufactured diamonds" as a terminology.

Synthetic connotes "fake", which manufactured diamonds certainly are not.

--
BMO

Re:Does that mean..

[LWATCDR]

That is exactly what he means and your girlfriend is correct. The problem is why should they be called anything but diamonds? Synthetic means fake to many people. A man made diamond is a diamond. What the Diamond makers wants are the same rules as the pearl growers have. A pearl is a pearl.

Re:Low-pressure construction?

[VooDoo999]

Google [google.com] has this built into their converter as well.

Re:Does that mean..

[Sendrid]

Supply and demand has nothing to do with the diamond market. As I understand it, the prices are kept artificially high by the diamond cartels and their storehouses of stones.

On the contrary, supply and demand has everything to do with the diamond market. You restrict supply by cornering the market, simultaneously bolstering demand through advertising, and prices increase, in accordance to the law of supply and demand.

No good instructional computer languages

[typical]

Someone give this guy a wedgie. He remembers how to program in Pascal.

It's too bad; Pascal was a good choice for an instructional language. Straightforward syntax and usable for real-world problems.

I think that the move to Java for introductory programming classes is very depressing. What people wanted was a "safe C", so that beginners didn't have to worry about bizarre misbehavior in their programs. Java, however, is a horrible choice for a teaching language, as it brings an entire raft of crap along with it, including all the OO crap, masses of library code, fat abstraction layers, and so forth. I've seen people take intro programming classes in Java and come out with some vague memories of some Java terminology, but not having learned anything about algorithms or structured thinking because they're busy struggling with all of the nonsense in Java.

The older I get, the more I think that Knuth is right about wanting CS classes to be taught in assembly.