Are the diamond’s days as an indestructible substance numbered? Possibly. At about 170,000 atmospheres, scientists managed to use super-hard graphite to crack one in 2003, but the exact reason why was somewhat of a mystery. Now maybe it’s not.
Today, two professors won the Nobel prize for physics “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”. The Nobel is the Olympic gold of science. But what is graphene, and why did it earn these guys over a million bucks?