There's a New Form of Carbon That's Harder Than Diamond

A Sotheby's employee holds huge white oval diamond that was auctioned in 2013. Scientists have created a substance that can now outmatch a diamond in hardness and brilliance.Scientists have created a substance that blings even brighter than diamonds, but chances are you won't wear it. You'll take its byproducts as medicine instead.

It's called Q-carbon, and researchers at North Carolina State University have made it by zapping a kind of loose carbon with a laser beam that lasts a fraction of a fraction of a blink of an eye -- 200 nanoseconds.

That's only 200 billionths of a second, but it's enough to heat the carbon to about 3,700 degrees Celsius. That's not far from double the heat many scientist say it took to make natural diamonds when they were formed a billion or more years ago.

Then the researchers let that carbon cool immediately, snapping its atoms into a special crystalline structure.

The result is a new substance that may have never existed on Earth before and has some unique properties.

The researchers published their results in the Journal of Applied Physics.