Tag: diamond

Dead people and pets are being forged into sparkling blue diamonds — here’s how the process works

On By A.P.In UncategorizedLeave a comment

by Dave Mosher

When a person dies, cremation is an increasingly popular option. The practice eclipsed burials in the US in 2015 and is expected to make up more than half of all body disposals by 2020, according to the Cremation Association of North America.

But instead of storing a loved one’s cremains in an urn or sprinkling them outside, a growing number of bereaved consumers are doing something more adventurous: forging the ashes into diamonds.

This is possible because carbon is the second-most abundant atomic element in the human body, and diamonds are made of crystallised carbon. Researchers have also improved ways to grow diamonds in the lab in recent years.

While at least five companies offer a “memorial diamond” service, Algordanza in Switzerland is one of the industry leaders — its services are available in 33 countries, and the company told Business Insider it sold nearly 1,000 corporeal gems in 2016. Algordanza also claims to be the only company of its kind that operates its own diamond-growing lab for cremains — one of two in the world. (The other is in Russia.)

“It allows someone to keep their loved one with them forever,” Christina Martoia, a spokesperson for Algordanza US, told Business Insider. “We’re bringing joy out of something that is, for a lot of people, a lot of pain.”

Here’s how the company uses extreme heat and pressure to turn dead people — and sometimes animals — into sparkling gems of all sizes, cuts, and colours.

Read more at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/turn-human-ashes-diamonds-carbon-algordanza-2017-7#14TJLUlcEiVFwIPR.99

Lightning storms make it rain diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter

On By A.P.In diamond, Jupiter, Saturn, Space and TimeLeave a comment

saturn

t sounds like a wacky fantasy, but scientists believe that it rains diamonds in the clouds of Saturn and Jupiter.

Diamonds are made from highly compressed and heated carbon. Theoretically, if you took a charcoal bricket out of your grill and heated it and pressed it hard enough for long enough, you could make a diamond.

On Earth, diamonds form about 100 miles underground. Volcanic magma highways then bring them closer to the surface, providing us with shiny gemstones that we stick in rings and ear studs.

But in the dense atmospheres of planets like Jupiter and Saturn, whose massive size generates enormous amounts of gravity, crazy amounts of pressure and heat can squeeze carbon in mid-air — and make it rain diamonds.

Scientists have speculated for years that diamonds are abundant in the cores of the smaller, cooler gas giants, Neptune and Uranus. They believed that the larger gaseous planets, Jupiter and Saturn, didn’t have suitable atmospheres to forge diamonds.

But when researchers recently analyzed the pressures and temperatures for Jupiter’s and Saturn’s atmospheres, then modeled how carbon would behave, they determined that diamond rain is very likely.

Diamonds seem especially likely to form in huge, storm-ravaged regions of Saturn, and in enormous quantities — Kevin Baines, a researcher at University of Madison-Wisconsin and NASA JPL, told BBC News it may rain as much as 2.2 million pounds of diamonds there every year.

The diamonds start out as methane gas. Powerful lightning storms on the two huge gas giants then zap it into carbon soot.

“As the soot falls, the pressure on it increases,” Baines told the BBC. “And after about 1,000 miles it turns to graphite – the sheet-like form of carbon you find in pencils.”

And the graphite keeps falling. When it reaches the deep atmosphere of Saturn, for example — around 3,700 miles down — the immense pressure squeezes the carbon into diamonds, which float in seas of liquid methane and hydrogen.

Eventually the gems sink toward the interior of the planet (a depth of 18,600 miles), where nightmarish pressure and heat melts the diamonds into molten carbon.

“Once you get down to those extreme depths,” Baines told the BBC, “the pressure and temperature is so hellish, there’s no way the diamonds could remain solid.”

http://www.techinsider.io/diamond-rain-saturn-jupiter-2016-4

Researchers find new phase of carbon, Q-carbon, that is brighter and harder than diamond and can be made easily and inexpensively in less than a second.

On By A.P.In carbon, carbon graphite, diamond1 Comment

Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, which is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond. They have also developed a technique for using Q-carbon to make diamond-related structures at room temperature and at ambient atmospheric pressure in air.

Phases are distinct forms of the same material. Graphite is one of the solid phases of carbon; diamond is another.

“We’ve now created a third solid phase of carbon,” says Jay Narayan, the John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State and lead author of three papers describing the work. “The only place it may be found in the natural world would be possibly in the core of some planets.”

Q-carbon has some unusual characteristics. For one thing, it is ferromagnetic – which other solid forms of carbon are not.

“We didn’t even think that was possible,” Narayan says.

In addition, Q-carbon is harder than diamond, and glows when exposed to even low levels of energy.
“Q-carbon’s strength and low work-function – its willingness to release electrons – make it very promising for developing new electronic display technologies,” Narayan says.

But Q-carbon can also be used to create a variety of single-crystal diamond objects. To understand that, you have to understand the process for creating Q-carbon.

Researchers start with a substrate, such as sapphire, glass or a plastic polymer. The substrate is then coated with amorphous carbon – elemental carbon that, unlike graphite or diamond, does not have a regular, well-defined crystalline structure. The carbon is then hit with a single laser pulse lasting approximately 200 nanoseconds. During this pulse, the temperature of the carbon is raised to 4,000 Kelvin (or around 3,727 degrees Celsius) and then rapidly cooled. This operation takes place at one atmosphere – the same pressure as the surrounding air.

The end result is a film of Q-carbon, and researchers can control the process to make films between 20 nanometers and 500 nanometers thick.

By using different substrates and changing the duration of the laser pulse, the researchers can also control how quickly the carbon cools. By changing the rate of cooling, they are able to create diamond structures within the Q-carbon.

“We can create diamond nanoneedles or microneedles, nanodots, or large-area diamond films, with applications for drug delivery, industrial processes and for creating high-temperature switches and power electronics,” Narayan says. “These diamond objects have a single-crystalline structure, making them stronger than polycrystalline materials. And it is all done at room temperature and at ambient atmosphere – we’re basically using a laser like the ones used for laser eye surgery. So, not only does this allow us to develop new applications, but the process itself is relatively inexpensive.”
And, if researchers want to convert more of the Q-carbon to diamond, they can simply repeat the laser-pulse/cooling process.

If Q-carbon is harder than diamond, why would someone want to make diamond nanodots instead of Q-carbon ones? Because we still have a lot to learn about this new material.

“We can make Q-carbon films, and we’re learning its properties, but we are still in the early stages of understanding how to manipulate it,” Narayan says. “We know a lot about diamond, so we can make diamond nanodots. We don’t yet know how to make Q-carbon nanodots or microneedles. That’s something we’re working on.”

NC State has filed two provisional patents on the Q-carbon and diamond creation techniques.
The work is described in two papers, both of which were co-authored by NC State Ph.D. student Anagh Bhaumik. “Novel Phase of Carbon, Ferromagnetism and Conversion into Diamond” will be published online Nov. 30 in the Journal of Applied Physics. “Direct conversion of amorphous carbon into diamond at ambient pressures and temperatures in air” was published Oct. 7 in the journal APL Materials.

Woman undergoes surgery to recover stolen 6 carat diamond she swallowed

On By A.P.In Crime, Human Behavior, smugglingLeave a comment

A Chinese woman who swallowed a six-carat (1.2g) diamond was forced to take laxatives and endure colonoscopy. Jiang Xulian, 39, stole the diamond worth Thb10m (£180,000) diamond from the Bangkok Gems and Jewellery Fair in Nonthaburi, Thailand.

She confessed to her theft to police when an X-ray showed the stone in her large intestine. The woman was later given laxatives before she and her alleged partner-in-crime – identified as Hae Ying, 34 – were held in police custody for legal action.

The couple had been brought to the attention of Thai police by an exhibitor at the fair. CCTV images showed the pair visiting the exhibition stand, where they allegedly switched the six-carat diamond with a fake, after asking to give it a closer inspection while at the jewellery fair.

The stall owner reported Jiang and Hae to the police, and they were detained at Suvarnabhumi airport on Thursday night. The pair tried to evade arrest by claiming they were tourists returning from their holidays, but their tale was proven to be fiction when a scan revealed the precious stone in Jiang’s stomach.

Jiang was given laxatives to speed up the movement of the diamond through her digestive system, but the diamond stayed in place. Jiang finally agreed to have an operation to remove the diamond, after being told that the jewel could cause damage to her digestive system.

The stone was identified as the stolen gemstone by its owner after its removal. The couple face up to three years in prison if convicted of the crime.

https://itsinterestingdotcom.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Earth-Size Diamond Found in Space

On By A.P.In Astrophysical Journal, diamond, Space and Time, starLeave a comment

A team of astronomers has identified possibly the coldest, faintest white dwarf star ever detected. This ancient stellar remnant is so cold that its carbon has crystallised, forming, in effect, an earth-sized diamond in space.

It is likely its age is the same as of the Milky Way, approximately 11 billion years old.

“It is a really remarkable object,” said David Kaplan, professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the US.

“These things should be out there, but because they are so dim they are very hard to find,” he said.

Kaplan and his colleagues found this stellar gem using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), as well as other observatories.

White dwarfs are extremely dense end-states of stars that have collapsed.

Composed mostly of carbon and oxygen, white dwarfs slowly cool and fade over billions of years.

“Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf, but we don’t see a thing,” said Bart Dunlap, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the team members.

“If there is a white dwarf there, and there almost certainly is, it must be extremely cold,” he added.

The researchers calculated that the white dwarf would be no more than a comparatively cool 3,000 degrees Kelvin (2,700 degrees Celsius).

Astronomers believe that such a cool, collapsed star would be largely crystallised carbon, not unlike a diamond.

The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/earth-size-diamond-found-in-space-547564