One of the reasons why diamonds are so valuable is because generally speaking, they are naturally occurring, which means that they need to be found and mined. This in turn has caused some controversy where due to the demand for them, it has created some questionable working conditions and labor issues.
This is why people are now looking towards more sustainable and ethical alternatives, and it seems that thanks to scientists over in Australia from the Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University in Melbourne, they have managed to create diamonds at room temperature and it only took them minutes.
While synthetic diamonds aren’t new and have been around for decades, what makes this particularly discovery interesting is that it can be created at room temperature. This is versus other synthetic diamonds that typically subject pieces of carbon to intense heat. With this technique, which the researchers claim was created using pressure equivalent to 640 African elephants balancing on a tip of a ballet shoe, they managed to create two types of structurally distinct diamonds.
One of which is similar to diamonds you might find on jewelry, and the other is a type known as Lonsdaleite, which can be found at the site of meteorite impacts and could be used for drilling through materials on mining sites.
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: edition.cnn