
The quest to make a crystal harder than diamonds - elijahparker
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160818-the-quest-to-make-a-crystal-harder-than-diamonds
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tempestn
A bunch of interesting facts in here. Obvious in retrospect, but I had never
considered the fact that in order to measure the hardness of a material, you
need something harder with which to indent it. And when you do have a harder
material, you unlock new possibilities, like this:

> Already Dubrovinskaia and her colleagues have applied this to study osmium,
> a metal that is among the most resistant to being compressed in the world.
> They found it could resist compression pressures of over 750 GPa. At this
> point, the inner electrons, which are normally tightly bound to the nucleus
> of the metal atom and are highly stable, began to interact with each other.
> The researchers believe this strange behaviour could lead the metal to
> change from being a solid into a previously unknown state of matter. They
> hope to investigate what properties this gives osmium in the future.

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quizme2000
"... with a device that can fit in her hand" and no photo of the device. Yet,
another example of bad/poor effort science reporting. The structure of this
article looked like an 17 year old copied and pasted some shit from google and
performed some really bad unit conversions. His/her editor should be ashamed
of such a POS article.

Device in question: [https://idw-
online.de/de/newsimage?id=42938&size=screen](https://idw-
online.de/de/newsimage?id=42938&size=screen)

~~~
njarboe
And smaller is not better or more impressive for this type of device.
Scientists would rather have large samples that could be put under such
pressures but so far only tiny samples can be contained and put under these
high temperature and pressure[1].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell)

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tim333
Took a little reading to find that the substance harder than diamonds is...
nanocrystalline diamond balls.

So a clearer way to put it might be - new form of diamond found that is harder
than regular diamonds.

Quite a lot harder:

>Whereas a diamond crystal will begin to give way at pressures of up to 120
Giga Pascals (GPa), the new material, however, can withstand at least 460 GPa.
It can even survive when pressed together to generate pressures of up to 1,000
GPa.

~~~
agumonkey
Seems like a ruppert drop, at the nanoscale, the surface "tension" yields a
stronger material.

