Fun fact: Diamonds can only be cut with diamonds. Diamonds are some of the hardest materials on earth, so the tools they use to do it are usually diamond bladed on the edges or have an edge of diamond dust. While step cut diamonds don’t shine as brightly as brilliant cut diamonds, they are typically clearer.

The process of cutting diamonds. Upon arrival of a rough diamond in India, New York, Antwerp, or elsewhere, a highly trained diamond cutter either cuts it by hand or using a machine. Despite the fact that diamond cutting machines are highly accurate and useful, hand cutting a diamond is an incredible craft work.

This involves the use of a diamond-edged saw or laser to carefully cut the diamond into the specified pieces. Because of the diamond’s natural hardness, the saw must be edged with actual diamonds in order to cut through the rough stone. The diamond then undergoes the process of bruting.

Scientists have calculated that wurtzite boron nitride and lonsdaleite (hexagonal diamond) both have greater indentation strengths than diamond. Source: English Wikipedia. (PhysOrg.com) — Currently, diamond is regarded to be the hardest known material in the world.

The outermost shell of each carbon atom has four electrons. In diamond, these electrons are shared with four other carbon atoms to form very strong chemical bonds resulting in an extremely rigid tetrahedral crystal. It is this simple, tightly-bonded arrangement that makes diamond one of the hardest substances on Earth.

Diamonds do not last forever. Diamonds degrade to graphite, because graphite is a lower-energy configuration under typical conditions. Diamond (the stuff in wedding rings) and graphite (the stuff in pencils) are both crystalline forms of pure carbon.

If you tried to eat it, you would suffer burns before you ever got it in your mouth. If it was poured into your open mouth by someone else, it would cause third degree burns. You wouldn’t be able to swallow it — lava is molten rock, and as such, is extraordinarily dense and viscous.

But yes, you’re correct. Anything living that has bones would certainly be destroyed by lava.

Lava won’t kill you if it briefly touches you. You would get a nasty burn, but unless you fell in and couldn’t get out, you wouldn’t die. With prolonged contact, the amount of lava “coverage” and the length of time it was in contact with your skin would be important factors in how severe your injuries would be!

One person has survived falling into much cooler lava in Tanzania in 2007, according to field reports from the Smithsonian. That lava was less than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, though, and the person who survived was still recovering and in pain more than five months later. But please, don’t step on the lava in Hawaii.

Soldier survives 70-foot fall into active Hawaiia’s Kilauea volcano. A 32-year-old soldier attempting to get a better view inside of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano fell in Wednesday night, authorities said. He was seriously injured, but survived after falling 70 feet into the volcano’s crater.

While lava can be as hot as 2200 F, some flames can be much hotter, such as 3600 F or more, while a candle flame can be as low as 1800 F. Lava is hotter than a typical wood or coal-buring fire, but some flames, such as that of an acetylene torch, is hotter than lava. Red lava is colder than candle flames.

The hottest thing that we know of (and have seen) is actually a lot closer than you might think. It’s right here on Earth at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When they smash gold particles together, for a split second, the temperature reaches 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.

The dead star at the center of the Red Spider Nebula has a surface temperature of 250,000 degrees F, which is 25 times the temperature of the Sun’s surface. This white dwarf may, indeed, be the hottest object in the universe.

Lava is the hottest natural thing on Earth. The layer closer to the surface is mostly liquid, spiking to an astounding 12,000 degrees and occasionally seeping out to create lava flows.

A chunk of copper became the coldest cubic meter (35.3 cubic feet) on Earth when researchers chilled it to 6 millikelvins, or six-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin). This is the closest a substance of this mass and volume has ever come to absolute zero.

At its surface (called the “photosphere”), the sun’s temperature is a whopping 10,000° F! That’s about five times hotter than the hottest lava on Earth. A temperature of 27 million degrees Fahrenheit is more than 12,000 times hotter than the hottest lava on Earth!