Here's an interesting related article from 2003 Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html
Wikipedia maintains a list of synthetic diamond manufacturers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_synthetic_diamond_manufacturers
A person working for $8/hour 40 hours a day 52 weeks a year makes 16640.
WOW! That's quite a trick!
I thought this was well understood and have explained it to my nieces/nephews and many others.
Corn starch as packaged for sale consists of VERY small grains (see http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0144861705005059-gr3.jpg). When mixed with water in appropriate proportions, they exhibit the same behavior as sand at the beach's edge where it will apear to dry when stepped on and when the pressure is removed will return to being very wet.
This has to do with dense packing behavior: When undisturbed, the particles naturally form a relatively dense packing due to it's low energy configuration. watter fills the space beween the particles. By disturbing the dense packing by applying an external force, the space beween particles increases alowing for more water to be stored in the inter-particle space. The natural dense packing will occur once the disruptive forces have disipated, so to remain in the more 'solid' state, the dense-packing arangement must constantly be disturbed.
If this research is aimed at the reason for the natural dense-packing in the first place, I thought that was also well understood. Am I missing something?
Yes, it's being additive which is why gravity dominates the large-scale structure of the universe (not accounting for dark energy). Electromagnetism likes to cancel out, while gravity likes to build and build.
Actually, althought net charge generally cancels out at large scales, currents and electromagnetic fields likely don't. The argument in the past has generally been that if there are large charge differences they will flow to cancel out. While this does happen, the flow is a current which creates a magnetic field so that when the charges are all finally neutralized, the magnetic field collapses and continues to drive the current. Same principle as a relaxation oscillator but on huge scales. We have observed plasma filaments carrying currents within our solar system and with the vast amount of plasma in the universe and it's excellent conductivity it would seem naive to assume that this wouldn't extend to larger scales. Large scale computer models using Maxwell's equations and the known laws governing plasma show galactic rotation curves that match observation without the need for 'Dark Mater', and unlike 'Dark Mater' or 'Dark Energy', these laws are experimentally verifiable and reproducible in the lab).
IMHO, the assumption that all electromagnetic effects can be ignored at large scales has led us down the ever more bizarre path of Dark Mater, Dark Energy, Cosmic Strings, etc. and many scientists are finally seeing the mountain of evidence that is building to overthrow that assumption. We can see magnetic effects on the sun where massive currents and fields produce CMEs, sunspots are known to be magentically produced phenomena, x-ray emmisions from commets show they have a direct high voltage electrical interaction with the solar environment,
...blah blah blah... It seems to me that he is also implicitly blaming America for the self-directed and self-interested bad behavior of other nations, like Iran.
Pretty far off base IMHO... You should try actually READING what Ron Paul says instead of regurgitating what you hear on TV. Specifically, try reading chapter 2 in his book "The Revolution: A manifesto" if you want to understand his foreign policy views, which he backs up with intelligent, logical, and rational arguments and reasoning.
If you have different ideas that's fine, but by misrepresenting what he stands for, you just sound like a tool for big-media and big-government anti-constitutionalists.
Here's an ML function call to help you figure it out without Slashdot intervention: fun caresAboutYourFreedom(candidate : Democrat) = 0 | caresAboutYourFreedom(candidate : Republican) = 0
More like...
fun caresAboutYourFreedom(candidate : Democrat) = 0
| caresAboutYourFreedom(candidate : RonPaul) = 1
| caresAboutYourFreedom(candidate : Republican) = 0
Do some reading man.
At this point anyone running for office who would fix this mess is either demonized by the media, or just outright ignored.
So, you just had to bring Ron Paul into this.
When I first heard him, I was astonished that any US politician still existed that actually respected and tried to defend the Constitution. I was kind of in shock.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood