Comment Re:Gemstone (Score 1) 247
It's hard enough to be scratchproof to the vast majority of things we encounter in our daily lives. Once you're harder than quartz and tool steel, there's not much you'll encounter in normal circumstances that can scratch you.
It's really not the spinel aspect that I find neat. It's the blurb about their process. They say they got it to work by two things: one, extreme purity (no surprise there), and two, mixing. No matter how well you try to mix fine powders together by any normal means such as shaking, you're never going to get a perfect mixture where all of the particles pack down together to their optimally dense arrangement. Apparently they've come up with a process that allows just that (they don't go into details).
Well, that's worth far more than spinel. Cheap and scalable production of materials comprised of perfectly arranged microstructures? It seems like such a thing could things in every field of materials science, from batteries to superconductors.
If, that is, it lives up to how the article makes it sound. TFA is rather high on hype and short on details.