Yes, We Can Turn Peanut Butter Into Diamonds

Scientists proved your favorite snack can transform under extreme pressure — but the process is slow, expensive, and surprisingly explosive.

african worker at a diamond polishing factory, gemological microscopes in lab diamond factory to precisely inspect diamonds for quality control, grading, and polishing — Source: poco_bw / Getty

Scientists have done something that sounds totally unreal: they turned peanut butter into diamonds. Yes — actual diamonds, made from the same peanut butter you spread on sandwiches.

Here’s how it works in simple terms. Peanut butter has a lot of carbon in it, and carbon is the main ingredient in diamonds. Deep underground, diamonds form when carbon is squeezed under huge pressure and extreme heat. So researchers tried the same thing in a lab.

They put peanut butter into a super-strong machine that can press harder than anything you’d ever experience in real life. Then they heat it up until the extra stuff — like oxygen — gets pushed out. When the peanut butter is under all that pressure and heat, the carbon inside it changes shape and locks together the same way it does in a real diamond.

But before you start stocking up on jars, there are some big downsides.

The process is slow. One experiment took weeks just to make a tiny diamond only a few millimeters wide. It’s also very expensive, because you need specialized machines most people will never have access to. The diamonds usually come out with impurities, since peanut butter has a bunch of other ingredients mixed in. And sometimes the process causes small explosions because of the gases released while the diamond forms.

So yeah — peanut butter can turn into a diamond, but it’s not something you can do at home or make money from..

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Yes, We Can Turn Peanut Butter Into Diamonds was originally published on thebeatdfw.com