Jackson's hair to be turned to diamonds

ABC July 25, 2009, 5:31 am

Getty Images © Enlarge photo

Since Michael Jackson's sudden death on June 25, the rumour mill over details of his bizarre personal life has ground away nearly non-stop.

One company says it is turning his hair into diamonds. That one is true.

In one by-product of the pop star's death, a Chicago company says it has obtained some of the hair Jackson burned while filming a 1984 Pepsi commercial and planned to create a limited edition of diamonds from it.

"Absolutely this is for real," said Dean VandenBiesen, founder of LifeGem, which has a patent on a process that extracts carbon from hair, turns it into crystals and then into high-quality laboratory diamonds.

Mr VandenBiesen said he thought the company could make about 10 diamonds.

No sale price has been set but Mr VandenBiesen said LifeGem created three diamonds from locks of Beethoven's hair in 2007 and sold one of them for around $200,000.

Separately, the August 6 issue of Rolling Stone magazine reported that not only was the left arm of Jackson's dead body "scored with needle marks" - claims that have arisen before - but he wore an artificial nose that was missing when he was taken to the Los Angeles county morgue.

While that report could not be confirmed, Los Angeles coroner's officials did say earlier this week they were probing security breaches in their offices.

The coroner's office is expected to release an official cause of death next week which could shed light on some of the reports, including Jackson's possible use of powerful drugs.

Love child rumours

Even as custody of Jackson's three children is set to be decided in court on August 3, The Sun newspaper speculated the singer may have had a love-child raised in Norway.

Omer Bhatti, 25, sparked interest when he was spotted sitting with the singer's immediate family at Jackson's public memorial earlier this month.

Mr Bhatti reportedly spent time with Jackson at his Neverland Valley Ranch in the 1990s and was known as 'Little Michael'.

But another of Jackson's former proteges, singer Ricky Harlow, told celebrity website People.com on Friday that although they were close he doubted Mr Bhatti was Jackson's son.

"They had a father-and-son type of connection," Harlow, 26, told People, "but I never thought he [Jackson] was his biological father."

In Jackson's 2002 will, the singer listed only three children now living: Prince Michael Jackson, Jr, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II.

- *Reuters*

Diamond is no longer nature’s hardest material

London: Diamond will always be a woman’s best friend but the gemstone is no longer the world’s hardest material, according to scientists. Instead, a rare natural substance, called lonsdaleite, which is made from carbon atoms just like diamond, has emerged as 58 per cent harder than the gemstone, according to a report in the New Scientist. An international team, led by Zicheng Pan at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, simulated how atoms in two substances believed to have promise as very hard materials would respond to the stress of a finely tipped probe pushing down on them. The simulation revealed that the first one, wurtzite boron nitride, withstood 18 per cent more stress than diamond, while the second, the mineral lonsdaleite, 58 per cent more. Rare mineral lonsdaleite is sometimes formed when meteorites containing graphite hit Earth, while wurtzite boron nitride is formed during volcanic eruptions that produce very high temperatures and pressures. If confirmed, however, wurtzite boron nitride may turn out most useful of the two, because it is stable in oxygen at higher temperatures than diamond. And, according to the scientists, this makes it ideal to place on the tips of cutting and drilling tools operating at high temperatures, or as corrosion resistant films on the surface of a space vehicle, for example. Paradoxically, wurtzite boron nitrides hardness appears to come from the flexibility of the bonds between the atoms that make it up. When its stressed some bonds tend to re-orientate themselves by about 90 to relieve the tension. Although diamond undergoes a similar process, something about the structure of wurtzite boron nitride makes it nearly 80 per cent stronger after the process takes place, the studys co-author Changfeng Chen of University of Nevada wrote in the Physical Review Letters journal. -PTI

Artificial diamonds - now available in extra large

by Catherine Brahic

The CVD diamond in the centre has not been annealed, the ones to the left and right have (Image: Hemley /PNAS)

Diamonds are a girl's best friend, they say - and soon they could be every girl's best friend.

A team in the US has brought the world one step closer to cheap, mass-produced, perfect diamonds. The improvement also means there is no theoretical limit on the size of diamonds that can be grown in the lab.

A team led by Russell Hemley, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, makes diamonds by chemical vapour deposition (CVD), where carbon atoms in a gas are deposited on a surface to produce diamond crystals.

The CVD process produces rapid diamond growth, but impurities from the gas are absorbed and the diamonds take on a brownish tint.

These defects can be purged by a costly high-pressure, high-temperature treatment called annealing. However, only relatively small diamonds can be produced this way: the largest so far being a 34-carat yellow diamond about 1 centimetre wide.

Microwaved gems

Now Hemley and his team have got around the size limit by using microwaves to "cook" their diamonds in a hydrogen plasma at 2200 °C but at low pressure. Diamond size is now limited only by the size of the microwave chamber used.

"The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow us to push to kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality," says Hemley's Carnegie Institute colleague Ho-kwang Mao.

"The microwave unit is also significantly less expensive than a large high-pressure apparatus," adds Yufei Meng, who also participated in the experiments.

The new technique is so efficient that the synthetic diamonds contain fewer impurities than those found in nature, says Meng. "We once sent one of our lab-grown diamonds for jewellery identification, it wasn't told apart from natural ones," she says.

One immediate application will be to make ultra-high quality windows that are optically transparent to lasers.

Threat to commerce

The team's method "could be routinely run in any laboratory where it is needed," says Alexandre Zaitsev, a physicist at the City University of New York, whose work also includes diamonds. "When considered in combination with the high-growth-rate technique of CVD diamonds, it seems to be a starting point of mass-scale production of perfect diamond material at a low price."

Zaitsev considers low-pressure annealing at temperatures greater than 2000 °C to be a "breakthrough in diamond research and technology".

The improving quality of synthetic diamonds threatens the natural diamond market. While 20 tonnes of natural diamonds are mined annually, some 600 tonnes of synthetic diamonds are produced each year for industrial use alone.

They are used in a range of high-end technologies, such as lasers and high-pressure anvils. Some companies have also started to sell synthetic diamonds as gemstones. In response, diamond giant De Beers has set up a "Gem Defensive Programme" with the aim of finding ways to tell apart synthetic and natural diamonds.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808230105)