Diamonds Are Nanotech's Best Friend
Bending Diamonds World's Strongest Material Now Bendable Researchers have been able to bend and stretch the strongest of all natural materials, diamonds. The international team led by Dao Ming of MIT showed that narrow diamond needles, similar in shape to rubber tips on toothbrushes, could flex and stretch by as much as 9% without breaking. These narrow diamond needles are just a few 100 nanometers across. The team was able to bend them like rubber and let them snap back to their original shape. That's an important first. Significance and Importance The importance of this breakthrough is the potential multi-uses. The door is now open to a variety of diamond based devices for future electronics, drug delivery directly into cells, data storage where lasers could encode data into diamonds. Also MRI imaging far more accurate, sensing, optoelectroncs and biocompatible in vivo imaging. That's just to name a few. Unique Breakthrough and Approach The team developed