Molten carbon can crystallize into diamond or graphite, but it has been difficult to study this process. New simulations show that graphite can sometimes "hijack" the pathway that would lead to ...

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 ...

Australian scientists have discovered strangely folded diamonds in rare meteorite samples. In investigating how they came to form, the team found evidence that they were forged in a cataclysm on an ...

A “folded diamond” doesn’t sound entirely plausible. But that’s exactly what we’ve found inside a rare group of meteorites known as ureilites, which likely came from the mantle of a dwarf planet or ...

Chinese and American scientists claim to be the first to make large enough quantities of diamonds with a hexagonal structure to test their physical properties. The substance has been sought for 60 ...

A treasure trove of diamonds may be sown into Mercury’s cratered crust. Billions of years of meteorite impacts may have flash-baked much of Mercury’s surface into the glittery gemstones, planetary ...

Diamond, with its tough-to-break carbon lattice of interlocking cubes, is traditionally considered the hardest material on Earth. Yet a rare form of diamond known as lonsdaleite—a crystal with carbon ...

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 ...

"This video explains why diamond and graphite have different properties depsite both being made of carbon. Diamond has a giant covalent structure with strong bonds, meaning that there are no free ...