How are diamonds made, and has anyone ever created life in the lab?

We explore the curious questions that science can answer

Carbon emission: a sparkle that takes millions of years to achieve (Getty/iStock)

How are diamonds made?

A synthetic diamond is made from graphite under high temperatures and pressures. It differs from a natural diamond in size, shape and the number of impurities. It is made specifically for industry.

Natural diamonds, by contrast, are made over millions of years from carbon sources in the Earth. But they, too, were made using high temperatures and pressures.

What are parachutes made of, and how long do they last?

Early parachutes used to be made of silk, but silk hasn’t been used in the manufacture of parachutes for some 50 years now. Instead, manufacturers generally use rip-stop nylon, which is made of lots of tiny squares which prevent a rip from propagating along its length.

A parachute will typically last for around 10 or 12 years, or 100 jumps (whichever comes first), before it needs to be replaced. Of course, it can be damaged before that – usually as a result of that sustained on landing. A standard person-carrying parachute requires about 100 square metres of material. 

Is it possible to insulate things from magnetism? If so, how?

Any object will become magnetised in the presence of a magnet. Often this is a temporary state, and as the magnet is moved away the object will be demagnetised. A few materials can be permanently magnetised.

A screen (as it is called) from magnetism must be highly magnetisable (but only temporarily). A good substance for this is “mu” metal alloy, which is an alloy in which two-thirds is iron and one-third nickel.

The object to be shielded is put inside a cylinder of the shield. When an external magnetic field is applied the shield becomes magnetised but the magnetic forces are limited to the surround of the cylinder; it shields the object inside from being magnetised. You can buy mu alloy metal, but you must get it already in the desired shape – any bending or hitting of the mu metal stops it working.

Do tachyons go faster than the speed of light?

A tachyon is a theoretical particle that is supposed to travel faster than the speed of light. They are also supposed to generate a special type of radiation, and physicists have been looking for this radiation for the past 20 years. Seeing as nobody has ever found this radiation or a tachyon, it rather suggests the tachyons were a result of a glitch in our mathematical theories, rather than the theory of relativity itself.

Has life been created in the laboratory? That is, has anyone made a primordial soup in a lab, sent a spark through it and ended up with life?

It has proven possible to produce some of the very basic units of life from basic elements. But to get those into the correct form and to produce the complex chemicals for life would be extremely difficult. It is very hard to produce the long stretches of DNA necessary even to code for the most basic of creatures. DNA has evolved to be copied; producing it from scratch is more difficult. Even if you do make the DNA, you then have to make all the proteins which form the DNA into chromosomes, and then all of the enzymes, nucleic acids, fats and carbohydrates which make up the cell. Then those chemicals have to be built into the structures that form the cell. Although it may be theoretically possible, the technology to be able to do it in the lab still evades us. There have been billions of years of evolution to make the creation of organisms possible. To try to replicate that in the lab is extremely inefficient. It’s much easier to do it naturally.