Peanut Butter Diamonds & Red Oxygen Crystals! Whoa!

[3113]

Peanut butter diamonds on display

Peanut butter is being turned into diamonds by scientists with a technique that harnesses pressures higher than those found at the centre of the earth. Edinburgh University experts say the feat is made possible by squeezing the paste between the tips of two diamonds creating a "stiletto heel effect".

The scientists also revealed they can turn oxygen into red crystals using the same method.

Demonstrations take place at Royal Society exhibition shows from 2 July.

Professor Malcolm McMahon, based at the Centre for Science and Extreme Conditions at Edinburgh University, is one of the scientists involved.

He said: "Pressure can cause extraordinary changes in all kinds of materials and can create completely novel materials. We are currently developing techniques that will create pressures of up to five million atmospheres, much higher than the pressure at the centre of the earth, to find the holy grail of high-pressure physics, the metallic phase of hydrogen. If we manage to make metallic hydrogen, the next step will be to make enough to study it in real detail, which would mean using much larger diamond anvils, about the size of your thumb, to squeeze it." He added: "Obviously large gem-quality diamonds would be extremely expensive, so we are looking at ways to make them artificially.

"Many carbon containing materials can be converted into diamond including peanut butter." Dr Colin Pulham, who is also based at the Edinburgh University, said: "Submitting substances to extremely high pressure is a valuable means for understanding their stability. High pressure testing of pharmaceuticals is becoming a useful technique to screen new and existing drugs. Understanding what happens to a drug's structure and its properties under pressure could lead to the development of medication which is better suited to hotter climates, or to the development of new forms of medication."

The free exhibition runs from Monday 2 to 5 July 2007.

Well. I'm impressed.

 

[only_more_so]

Well. I'm impressed.

Yummy! I love peanut butter. Even though California is stupid and the stores around here don't stock the brand of peanut butter I've eaten practically every day of my life. Well, that is an exaggeration, but if you count every sandwich I've ever eaten, it probably comes within 80% of the number of days I've been alive. My mom even told me my first real food was peanut butter.

Oh, and red oxygen's cool too.

 

[matriarch]

Red Oxygen Crystals..........stunning!!

http://web.mit.edu/petrolab/www/PrettyRock.jpg


The description under the picture might as well have been in Swahili for all it meant to me.....I understood the words individually...it was when they put them all together......

Thin section of an experimentally produced mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) from a one-atmosphere controlled oxygen fugacity cooling rate experiment. Sample started as a spherical melt blob and grew crystals as the melt was cooled over its solidification interval. Sample is ~5 mm in diameter. Grey minerals are plagioclase. Red crystals are olivine and augite + pigeonite are intergrown with the plagioclase. Crossed polarized light.

 

[rgraham666]

Thin section of an experimentally produced mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) from a one-atmosphere controlled oxygen fugacity cooling rate experiment. Sample started as a spherical melt blob and grew crystals as the melt was cooled over its solidification interval. Sample is ~5 mm in diameter. Grey minerals are plagioclase. Red crystals are olivine and augite + pigeonite are intergrown with the plagioclase. Crossed polarized light.

I understood all of it except for the word 'fugacity'.

Which my OED defines as:

1 poetic/literary the quality of being fleeting or evanescent.
2 Chemistry a thermodynamic property of a real gas that, if substituted for the pressure or partial pressure in the equations for an ideal gas, gives equations applicable to the real gas.

I'm still not sure what it means, but it sounds cool.

 

[Adi87]

Well. I'm impressed.

Sound really cool.