cheats for making dna for little alchemy 2

“What’s exciting about this paper is it shows a way of cheating the thermodynamics of what’s typically required for diamond formation.” - Rodney EwingĪs a result, diamonds can provide insight into the conditions and materials that exist in the planet’s interior. Most natural diamonds unearthed to date rocketed upward in volcanic eruptions millions of years ago, carrying ancient minerals from Earth’s deep interior with them. Natural diamonds crystallize from carbon hundreds of miles beneath Earth’s surface, where temperatures reach thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. “If you can make even small amounts of this pure diamond, then you can dope it in controlled ways for specific applications,” said study senior author Yu Lin, a staff scientist in the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Diamond’s physical properties – extreme hardness, optical transparency, chemical stability, high thermal conductivity – make it a valuable material for medicine, industry, quantum computing technologies and biological sensing. Understanding the mechanisms for this transformation will be important for applications beyond jewelry. “We wanted to see just a clean system, in which a single substance transforms into pure diamond – without a catalyst,” said the study’s lead author, Sulgiye Park, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Scientists have synthesized diamonds from other materials for more than 60 years, but the transformation typically requires inordinate amounts of energy, time or the addition of a catalyst – often a metal – that tends to diminish the quality of the final product. Senior study author Yu Lin shows models of diamondoids with one, two and three cages, which can transform into the intricate, pure-carbon lattice of diamond – seen in the larger, blue model at right – when subjected to extreme heat and pressure.

Cheats for making dna for little alchemy 2