Diamonds

Industrial pipes carrying water or chemicals invariably get gunked up as deposits accumulate on their internal surfaces. Researchers in Texas have found that lining pipes with lab-grown diamond film can prevent buildup like nothing else.

We recently sat down with Adam Khan of Diamond Quanta – the company that wants to replace the silicon chip with ones made from diamond. We discussed the reason for this glittering idea, the challenges it presents, and the implications of the technology.

The second largest diamond in the world has been discovered in Botswana. Canadian mining company Lucara Diamond used an advanced X-ray scanner to find a 2,492-carat diamond from its Karowe Diamond Mine. That's a whopping 17.58 oz (498.4 g).

BC8 superdiamonds are harder than any known material, but they likely only exist in the cores of giant exoplanets. Now, the Frontier supercomputer has unraveled the secret of their formation, a finding that could lead to their production on Earth.

Diamonds are famously formed under high pressure and temperature, which is partly why they’re so valuable. But now, scientists have created diamonds in a lab under regular pressure in just 15 minutes.

Fraunhofer scientists have used ultra-thin diamond membranes to drastically cool electronic components and boost electric vehicle charging speeds, taking advantages of diamond's outstanding thermal conductivity.

It’s taken more than three decades, but scientists have cracked the code and created a material that’s near-impossible to break and rivals diamond as the hardest substance on the planet. The applications for this long-sought-after substance are vast.

Diamond is a promising material for data storage, and now scientists have demonstrated a new way to cram more data onto it, down to a single atom. The technique bypasses a physical limit by writing data to the same spots in different-colored light.

Researchers are claiming a breakthrough in quantum communications, thanks to a new diamond-stretching technique they say greatly increases the temperatures at which qubits remain entangled, while also making them microwave-controllable.

Australian scientists have discovered strangely folded diamonds in rare meteorite samples. In investigating how they came to form, the team found evidence that they were forged in a cataclysm on an ancient dwarf planet.

A team of Harvard engineers working to advance laser technology have turned to one of the strongest known materials in diamonds, which they've used to form a new mirror that can endure beams strong enough to burn through steel.

Researchers in Japan have developed a new method for making 2-in wafers of diamond that could be used for quantum memory. The ultra-high purity of the diamond allows it to store a staggering amount of data – the equivalent of a billion Blu-Ray discs.