Working with sparkly gemstones every day, it's easy to forget that diamond has industrial uses as well. The properties that make it great for an engagement ring - the incredible hardness, the way it refracts light and so on - are also important to engineers and scientists. I found a fascinating little article here about scientists who have been trying to grow thin films of a diamond-like structure to make semiconductors - useful for the next generation of computer chips. The cool part is that they succeeded doing it out of tequila, which has the right proportion of alcohol and water.
You'll never be able to get a jewellery-grade gemstone out of this process, but imagine having tequila-based diamond semiconductors in your phone, your laptop, everything...
Read more in the Guardian here.
Photo courtesy of Bethany L King
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