Harder-Than-Diamond Natural Carbon Crystals Found 250
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."
One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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?
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Informative)
The very end of the article suggests that they are harder than regular naturally occurring diamonds.
However, there is no way at the present to compare them to the artificial ultra-hard diamonds known as lonsdaleite and boron nitride, Ferroir said.
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So, are these naturally-ocurring aggregated diamond nanorods (ADNRs)?
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Informative)
However, there is no way at the present to compare them to the artificial ultra-hard diamonds known as lonsdaleite and boron nitride, Ferroir said.
Boron nitride is not diamond at all, and lonsdaleite is described by Wikipedia as an allotrope of carbon that is found in meteorites and is harder than diamonds. Perhaps these people have just re-discovered something that was already known.
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Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Informative)
They've got an odd definition of "diamond" there: boron nitride has no carbon in it. It's a chemical analogue of diamond, in that you turn half the C atoms (atomic number 6) into B (atomic number 5) and the others into N (atomic number 7). B-N compounds are fun analogues of C compounds but it's a bit of a stretch.
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Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Funny)
And I, for one, welcome our new shiny super tough, space born overlords
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Funny)
And I, for one, welcome our new shiny super tough, space born overlords
Not without DeBeers permission, you don't!
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And much more expensive too... are you listening, De Beers Intergalactic?
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Funny)
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Especially when the lad searching for the meteorite to give to his love, finds that it is not a rock but a girl.
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does this mean De Beers will try to monopolize space as well?
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The De Beers Myth (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:The De Beers Myth (Score:4, Insightful)
So you are saying that De Beers is only as big as everyone else combined? Crack a history book. Until the last decade, their business practices have been deplorable, and they are still huge.
Read more carefully (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt it, they've not found enough space children caught up in intergalactic warfare to exploit yet.
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Funny)
I move that we start referring to these super hard diamonds as Viagronds.
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Nah, that could never happen. Us humans are the most powerful force in the universe. No asteroid passing through a supernova [pelicanparts.com], and then flying through intergalactic space, and finally crashing on the Earth, could possibly go through more stress than say a water filled carbon based container [justpressplay.net] at a Metallica concert [showclix.com].
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Informative)
... not harder than natural diamonds.
That is because what they are (or should be) talking about is not hardness, but mechanical strength. Black diamonds are not harder, but because they consist of microscopic crystals, they don't have the convenient break lines of monocrystals, and therefore are more difficult to process. See:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0612-mystery_diamonds.htm [sciencedaily.com]
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In the past, you could tell artificial diamonds from natural ones because of imperfections, but with today's technology, you can't tell even with a microscope.
Get some up to date info buddy!!
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Not only that...
You know the old saying about running from bears? You don’t have to be faster than the bear; you just have to be faster than your buddy... remember that one?
What they just said is, if you escape, it suggests that you were faster than the bear.
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What they just said is, if you escape, it suggests that you were faster than the bear.
If there were a multitude of bears pursuing you all and repeatedly applied with the intention of consuming you all equally, with the common result that everyone who is slower than a bear is devoured regardless of their speed relative to each other, then that's exactly what it would imply.
That's what you're doing when you're polishing. Yes you can polish down softer materials more than harder ones, but then on the next pas
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That's what you're doing when you're polishing. Yes you can polish down softer materials more than harder ones, but then on the next pass the raised harder material, if softer than what you're polishing it with, should also be worn down.
They didn’t say it wasn’t worn down. They said it was worn down less than the surrounding areas.
It’s harder. It wears more slowly. This has no relevance to whether or not it’s harder than the polishing grit.
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They didn't say it wasn't worn down. They said it was worn down less than the surrounding areas.
They said it was "raised well above the surface", which means that it wasn't worn down even after repeated application of the polish.
If it wasn't harder than the polish, then the fact that it was raised would mean it would be worn down faster than the areas around it, so that it would quickly become level with the rest. That's how polishing works.
It's harder. It wears more slowly. This has no relevance to whethe
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But is it harder than a bear. Or deBeers? And if 'de Bears' were to play 'de Bulls'...
THIS crystalline carbon has never been found... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
As the saying goes... (Score:5, Funny)
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."
The remnants of my empire (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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"Eventually I will get off this rock."
Rule #34 comes to mind ...
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Mohs Scale of Hardness (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mohs Scale of Hardness (Score:5, Funny)
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I think the more interesting thing is, slashdot readers are assumed to know what Moh's scale is, but spinal tap needs a reference...
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According to the wiki article:
Since the invention of the scale, there have been reports of materials harder than the highest mineral on the scale, diamonds; so the Mohs scale may be changed in the future.
And the reference is:
T. Irifune, A Kurio, S. Sakamoto, T. Inoue, H. Sumiya "Ultrahard polycrystalline diamond from graphite" Nature 421 (2003) 599 [nature.com]
A big meh to this slashdot story.
Nature summary:
Polycrystalline diamonds are harder and tougher than single-crystal diamonds and are therefore valuable for cutting and polishing other hard materials, but naturally occurring polycrystalline diamond is unusual and its production is slow. Here we describe the rapid synthesis of pure sintered polycrystalline diamond by direct conversion of graphite under static high pressure and temperature. Surprisingly, this synthesized diamond is ultrahard and so could be useful in the manufacture of scientific and industrial tools.
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It is interesting that there has been a substance created harder than regular diamonds that has been published for seven years! I figured there would be saw blades everywhere which advertised "new, better than diamond tipped!"
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Depends on how expensive/difficult to make/etc. the new 'diamonds' are. They could be too expensive to economically make. They could be so expensive that they are only used in specialized industrial/commercial applications. (I.E. people willing to pay seriously big, big bucks per bl
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The actual hardness may actually be a 10.5 or 10.7 or 12. My guess is that they won't arbitrarily call this new structure 11 simply because it is harder than a 10. There may yet be even harder structures, or structures harder than diamond but softer than this.
Re:Mohs Scale of Hardness (Score:4, Informative)
The Mohs hardness is ordinal, not linear, so until unless this item is added to the scale it will have an undefined Mohs hardness. Actual engineers use Brinell hardness or something similar.
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What are you going to use as an indenter? Besides, that's a different measure of hardness; resistance to abrasion is different than indent hardness.
Old news... (Score:2, Funny)
RPGers around the world had known this for years: a meteorite sword is better than a diamond sword.
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Don't diamonds have really weak fracture points, hit it at the right angle and it shatters
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They also burn and are great for BBQ.
Lonsdaleite (Score:5, Informative)
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It probably *COULD* hold more *for a time*. But the question is what is the failure load in all directions? Buildings/bridges/dams/etc are not static structures. They 'move around'; be it wind or snow or people just walking around on it. They are designed to 'float' in the dirt. Ever been in a house that 'settled' a little? The house didnt collapse it just bent a little. That is part of the design. Buildings/bridges that do not flex break, and quite spectacularly.
This is an example of a design that
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For example concrete is also harder than steel. It is however extremely brittle which is why roadways and building structures are reinforced with something 'hard' but flexible.
That’s why they created pre-stressed concrete. The key is to keep the concrete under compression at all times and transfer all tensile forces to a different structural component that performs well under tension.
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Another way to make harder than normal diamonds (Score:4, Informative)
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So, getting isotopcially pure diamond is a way to make it stronger and higher-performance... but really the gains are small compared to the considerable effort required to purify.
I'm not sure how artificial diamonds are made, but 13C is only about $300/gram and is sold commercially, and many compounds containing it are cheaper than that. I imagine that artificial diamonds are already quite expensive, so a few percent boost in strength might make the materials cost worth it. I knew of a guy who was raisin
Londsaleite or not? (Score:2, Informative)
--
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> If the substance they found in the meteorite is indeed harder than carbon,
> then it probably isn't Londsaleite...
I don't see that they claimed that it is.
Simple explination (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Journal Article (Score:3, Informative)
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 [elsevier.com].
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.
Where can I find a knob that goes to 11? (Score:2)
link to orign article (Score:4, Informative)
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 [sciencedirect.com]
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.
Re:I don't know about you (Score:5, Informative)
...do you think that the meteorite was made by magicians?
Space is natural too.
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As is magic, only rarer.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't bother. It turns out that it's less expensive than a diamond, so women won't be as happy with it.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How long (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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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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
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You have some great ideas.
What if your girlfriend got you an iPad
Will you marry me? :D
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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*
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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.
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Everyone has different tastes. You ought to get people presents they like rather than something you like.
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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?
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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 th
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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.
Re:How long (Score:4, Funny)
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!
Majorly confused now (Score:2, Funny)
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Just say "Yes,diamond is not the hardest metal known to man" and move on...
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depends whether you are a chemist or an astrophysicist.
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Which is precisely why it can't possibly be the hardest metal known to man.
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How hard is metallic Hydrogen?
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In space, it is. Astronomers divide the universe into hydrogen, helium, and "metals".
Re:Majorly confused now (Score:5, Insightful)
A much better name for this stuff would be "carbonite", obviously.
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Your rich and vivid imagination is going to get your ass kicked.
Re:What about bb's? (Score:5, Informative)
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Space is natural unless you're a bible-thumping redneck.
I'm pretty sure carbon was discovered already.
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Hm, I think an experiment involving replacing your lotion with a diamond polishing paste would put the lie to your boast!