Could it hold two humpback whales???

Definitely cool, but probably has the same issues most of these ‘made under high pressure/temperature’ materials have; they’re expensive to make, and have a high rate of failure for larger pieces. Still, since it sounds like its a similar process and structure to metals (aka a bunch of small crystalline structures next to each other), it has a chance of being scalable.

But so much of our crystal creating processes are really only feasible on a small scale. Lab diamonds are super cheap industrially, and even jewelry grade gems are pretty damn affordable.

But if you look at a shopping search for sapphire windows, you’ll see how the price absolutely skyrockets are the size gets more that a few dozen mm across. So I’m pretty skeptical if this tech being terribly useful for much larger than that scale in anything other than like Aerospace, where price is less of an object.

(also I hate clickbait associating hardness with strength. High hardness can actually make a material worse at being bullet proof; Young’s modus, and other measures of tensile strength and/or elasticity are better at stopping bullets; see actual bullet proof ‘glass’ having layers of soft material in it.)

Scientists Just Created a New “Ass” That’s Tougher Than Diamond

Does anyone have a scholarly article for this? I couldn’t find one linked and I’m tired. It is really cool though, looks like crystalized buckyballs, which is neat. I really appreciate the scmp article that was linked that talked about the collaborative effort, really important in science. Why do they always have way better, more interesting, and insightful articles than any other non specialized english news outlet.