[Red Badger]

A small rod of glassy carbon.

[KoRn]

/mark

[Jonty30]

Depending how much it weighs, I can see this being used to protect soldiers or other kinds of shirlding if it can be produced in mass quantities.

[Uncle Ike]

” The team was led by Stanford’s Wendy L. Mao and her graduate student Yu Lin and includes Carnegie’s Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, Li Zhang, Paul Chow, Yuming Xiao, Maria Baldini, and Jinfu Shu “

Stanford?? Or a Chinese Farming Village??

[M Kehoe]

Maybe one day we will have elevators to lower earth orbit?

Read that in a book one time, can't think of the author or title.

5.56mm

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

anvils<\i>??? All the blacksmiths will be happy.

[Captain Beyond]

bflr

[Defiant]

That’s nothing. Check Obama’s skull.

[Soothesayer9]

Well thats nice, but when can I buy my +6 Grandmaster Armor already? Dragons aint gonna off themselves!

[Joe Brower]

I don't see any mention of how well this material withstands temperature extremes, but if it does well in both cold and hot ranges, it sounds like an excellent choice for spacecraft construction. Depending on how easy it is to manufacture and fabricate into usable forms, that is.

Of course, since our federal government prefers to spend our monetary resources on the welfare class, this might be a moot point in any case. I'd say private space ventures might have a go at it, but that is also prey to federal regulatory burdens, so that too may be a non-starter...

[pepsi_junkie]

The team was led by Stanford's Wendy L. Mao and her graduate student Yu Lin and includes Carnegie's Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, Li Zhang, Paul Chow, Yuming Xiao, Maria Baldini, and Jinfu Shu.

Mao, Zhang, Chow, Xiao, Shu, and ... Maria Baldini? How did she sneak in there? But seriously, can't China get their own chinese scientists to come up with some ideas so they don't need to steal technology secrets from our chinese scientists all the time?

[bvw]

It is an amorphous material, meaning that its structure lacks the long-range order of crystals.

That's speculation, I'm guessing.

One clue is "long range order of crystals", like what is that supposed to mean? Probably not enough of the material has been extensively tested yet.

[bvw]

Here’s some bvw dreamland speculations. In such dense fermi-level locked structures, we can quantumly entangle some nuclei and have bound nuclei that become a quantum-resonant mix of nitrogen and carbon. That entanglement might make the structures defiant of X-Ray crystallography, and make it look amorphous, when actually it’s just a denser diamond lattice. You might be able to measure this by decay rates if you have some C-14 in there.

[allmost]

They lie.