Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making near-flawless diamonds and plans to begin marketing them by years end. This sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the publics perception of diamonds - and to transform the $7 billion industry. More intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based semiconductors.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html
Monday, August 11, 2003
Popular Posts
-
The concept of dragons was probably brought to Japan around 2,000 years ago, along with the technology for paddy agriculture. Their images h...
-
...These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individu...
-
His system, he said, starts with a laser that sends part of its beam into photo detectors which produce electrical signal that feed back to ...
-
Someone that gets it. Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate m...
-
...why was this given the file name of skyfall?... Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to beli...
-
When it comes to buying equipment, think g, not b. New 802.11g hardware is nearly five times faster than 802.11b gear, and it will interoper...
-
This edition provides a prose rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cycle of poems preserved on clay tablets surviving from ancient Mesopo...
-
From the bygone debates over DDR vs. RDRAM to the current controversy over Apples DDR implementations, one issue is commonly misunderstood i...
-
In my mind, this is a huge waste of effort. Put a base on Mars instead of the Moon -- there's huge science finds waiting there to be dis...
-
Personally, I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complex, ordered (yet chaotic) systems which are not necessarily biologi...