Diamonds

Sometimes it seems that as soon as an anti-counterfeiting process is created, someone finds a way of circumventing it. A new system could be particularly hard to foil, however, as it utilizes tiny diamonds.

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.

Scientists have turned plastic into diamonds. Using high-powered lasers, the team zapped samples of common PET plastic, which produces intense heat and pressure to form tiny diamonds that may naturally rain down on planets like Uranus and Neptune.

Arkenlight and Axorus have teamed up to prototype the first artificial neuron powered by a diamond betavoltaic battery made from nuclear waste. The goal is to develop medical-grade implants with energy sources that will last decades without charging.

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.

Researchers at Carnegie Science have developed an ultrahard diamond glass. Made entirely of crushed “soccerballs” of carbon, the new material also has high thermal conductivity and could find use in electronics.

Material scientists in China experimenting with carbon in its many forms have conjured up a form of glass so hard that it can scratch the surface of a diamond, while also having the ability to act as semiconductor.

A new method converts carbon from a variety of sources straight into useful forms such as graphene or diamond. The technique uses a “flash” of electricity to heat the carbon, converting it into a final form determined by the length of the flash.

Geologists have studied tiny fluid impurities in diamonds to figure out how old humanity’s favorite rocks might be. They identified three periods of diamond formation in Africa over billions of years, with intriguing implications for ancient Earth.

Exotic forms of carbon were predicted to exist under extremely high pressures. But in a new study researchers have examined carbon under the highest pressure ever studied in the lab, and found that diamond sticks around much longer than expected.

There’s no such thing as random in classical physics – for true randomization you need to turn to quantum physics. Now scientists have done just that, creating secure encryption keys based on the genuine randomness of quantum vibrations of diamond.