Jeweler Harry Winston donated the famous Hope Diamond—the largest-known deep blue diamond in the world—to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958. It arrived in a plain brown package by registered mail, ...

A team of Chinese scientists may have cracked the secret behind the strange Canyon Diablo diamonds. Hexagonal in form rather than cubic, the process behind how these diamonds formed has, until now, ...

A pair of diamonds that formed hundreds of kilometers deep in Earth’s malleable mantle both contain specks of materials that form in completely opposing chemical environments—a combination so unusual ...

Diamonds are famous for their strength, but scientists have long suspected that another form of diamond might be even harder. Evidence of this was gathered over the past sixty years in meteorite ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Geoscientists can't say if diamonds are ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...