Scientists Create New Super Hard Carbon That Can Dent Diamonds
You know how they sat that a lady’s best friend is one of the world’s hardest substances – well, not now thanks to a bunch of researchers at the Carnegie Institution.
It seems that the researchers have discovered a way to build a structure called carbon-60 out of those magical buckyball-style carbon spheres, which after they were connected were filled with the solvent xylene and then put under incredible pressure – 320,000 times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It was this point that some of the carbon spheres began collapsing into clusters of carbon atoms while others maintained their structure; which ended up creating a super strong lattice formation.
What resulted in the end was a never-before-seen form of carbon that contained ordered and disordered structures and the result is strong enough that it can actually dent diamonds.
“We created a new type of carbon material, one that is comparable to diamond in its inability to be compressed,” Wang said. “Once created under extreme pressures, this material can exist at normal conditions, meaning it could be used for a wide array of practical applications.”
via Science Daily
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
