Superheated Water Etches Diamond
Etched A new study etched diamonds with super-heated water. This photo of a single crystal diamond belonging to a Flickr user. Striving to a goal on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0Water acting weird Yowch. Researchers have gotten water to etch diamond by trapping the water next to the diamond's surface and heating the water to its supercritical phase. They had wanted to know how diamond and graphene—both made of carbon atoms, but arranged very differently—would interact at high temperatures, Loh Kian Ping, the research team's leader and a chemist at the National University of Singapore, told Popular Science in an email. Graphene is a sheet made of a single layer of carbon atoms, while in diamond, the carbon is arranged in a crystal structure. Loh and his colleagues wet a graphene membrane and laid it on a crystal of diamond. They then heated the whole deal to about 1,275 degrees Kelvin, or 1,835...