Posted on 11/28/2020 6:51:22 PM PST by Red Badger
The billion-year wait for the perfect sparkler is over after an Australian-led scientific team discovered how to make diamonds in minutes.
The process is thought to take an age, huge amounts of pressure and super-hot temperatures, hundreds of kilometres beneath the earth’s crust.
But researchers at the Australian National University and RMIT have figured out how to make carbon crystallise into diamonds in a laboratory at room temperature.
“It’s all down to how we apply the pressure—we allow the carbon to experience something called ‘shear’—which is like a twisting or sliding force,” physicist Jodie Bradby told AAP.
“We think this allows the carbon atoms to move into place forming both lonsdaleite and regular diamonds, like those found on engagement rings.
“We’re not doing this in anything super amazing or explosive. We just squeeze the material together at extreme pressure.
“It all happens in minutes.”
The team has previously created lonsdaleite—which is 58 per cent harder than regular diamonds—at high temperatures.
They’re hoping their nature-defying breakthrough allows them to develop the ultra-hard diamond for industrial use in cutting tools like those found on mine sites.
“Any process at room temperature is way easier and cheaper to engineer than a process you have to run at several hundred or a thousand degrees,” Bradby said.
“Unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to mean cheaper diamonds for engagement rings.
“But our lonsdaleite diamonds might become a miner’s best friend if we can save them having to change costly drill bits as often.”
The team’s research findings on the room temperature diamonds were published in the journal Small.
Koalas are diseased little freaks.
Don’t let my wife see this article. I can’t afford any diamond right now.
The price of raw diamond might drop, but the familiar diamonds that you see in jewelry are the product of painstaking labor, a precise sculpture carved out of the hardest material in nature.
Shear, like the force of a single land mass breaking apart during a global flood that laid down millions of dead things buried in rock layers all over the earth 6000 years ago. Even ocean animals on the Himalayas.
The hardest material in nature is has got to be a demonratcommie skull, you can’t hammer any thing inside it.
“The next challenge for us is to lower the pressure required to form the diamonds.
In our research, the lowest pressure at room temperature where diamonds were observed to have formed was 80 gigapascals. This is the equivalent of 640 African elephants on the tip of one ballet shoe!”
https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first-time-ever-scientists-create-diamonds-in-the-lab-without-heat
I’m aware of all that. I also know that a monopoly, particularly a limited one, with a specific commodity, is a bubble waiting to burst. De Beers is a relic and when it collapses suddenly, everyone will nod and say, well of course, surprised it lasted as long as it did.
As for being state sanctioned, that’s only as good as the state doing the sanctioning. States, too, can collapse suddenly.
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