A Chinese research team has produced bulk hexagonal diamond, a crystal structure long theorized to be harder than conventional cubic diamond, from compressed graphite. The work, led by Sun Jian at ...

Diamonds are famous for their strength, but scientists have long suspected that another form of diamond might be even harder. Evidence of this was gathered over the past sixty years in meteorite ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

In brief: Chinese researchers have developed a synthetic diamond that is significantly harder and more resilient than those that occur naturally here on Earth. If commercially viable, the new diamond ...

To synthesize the crystals, the team compressed highly ordered pyrolytic graphite to pressures as high as 20 gigapascals, roughly 200,000 times the atmospheric pressure at Earth’s surface. Chinese ...

After decades of debate, researchers say that they have found the clearest evidence yet for this rare form of carbon. Diamond is famously known as the hardest mineral on Earth. But researchers have ...

Molten carbon can form into either diamond or graphite. A new study shows how graphite can sometimes form even under conditions that should lead to diamond. (Getty Images) The graphite found in your ...