A team of scientists from two universities in China have synthesized a material harder than diamond in the laboratory. When ...

For the first time, researchers in China have synthetically produced a nearly pure hexagonal diamond, marking a significant ...

At its core, the diamond battery thrives on decay — specifically, the decay of the carbon-14 isotope. Carbon-14 is best known ...

One reason is that the chemical bond between each carbon atom that makes up a diamond is extremely strong. Another is that the atoms form a rigid structure—each atom is connected to four others ...

Where would carbon-based life be without carbon? There are 118 known chemical elements, but carbon is the fourth most ...

As another plus, this carbon-14 is derived from graphite blocks, which are a byproduct of nuclear fission reactors. So, not ...

No scientist can travel that far underground, so we don't know exactly how diamonds are created. But we know they are formed of carbon atoms coming together under intense pressure and heat to form ...

Despite industry claims, there are few controls to prevent diamond sales from financing violence and abuse around the world.

Others maintain that carbon atoms (or ... have been fashioned in the same conditions under which clear diamonds are thought to form. That is, they were crafted deep within the Earth, 100 to ...

Natural diamonds form out of carbon that gets stuck in lava tubes about a mile deep in the Earth's crust. The final purification step converts the carbon into slippery sheets of graphite — the ...

Pure carbon is found in nature in several different forms, or allotropes, including graphene, diamond, nanotubes, and fullerenes or "buckyballs." Each form has attributes that make it excel at ...