What do you do with a flawless diamond? If you’re a physicist, you sure don’t give it to someone you love. You build an X-ray laser!

The first hard X-ray laser in the world was turned on in 2009 at the National Accelerator Laboratory in California. This mile-long machine doesn’t use any diamonds -- instead, it uses free-flying electrons in a vacuum to create light in pulses, which are billions of times brighter and shorter than any other light source. The problem is, there’s only one such machine. Tons of scientists are waiting in line, hoping to use the hard X-ray laser for important experiments. They need a more compact machine, and recent experiments at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in Illinois have proved that nearly flawless diamonds have what it takes to build one. “The only way we can see to build the next generation of X-ray lasers is by using diamond crystals,” Yuri Shvydko of ANL told Discovery News.

Normal lasers work by bouncing one wavelength of light between two mirrors that are often made of silicon. The light gains energy each time it bounces, and a tiny hole in one mirror allows a thin beam of the energized light to escape. But silicon mirrors won’t bounce X-rays, which have a very tiny wavelength. This is where those perfect diamonds come in.

Unfortunately, perfect diamonds are impossible to find in nature. Your mom’s diamond ring, no matter how much it cost, has some tiny flaws. To get a perfect stone, you have to make it yourself. By spraying a carbon gas cloud into a high-pressure chamber, scientists can mimic the weight of a mountain pressing down for millions of years on organic material. These synthetic diamonds often come out more perfect than natural ones, but these best of all diamonds are too precious to end up in someone’s ring or necklace. These diamonds are destined to change the future of research and maybe even medicine, according to Shvydko and his colleagues. With the ability to focus such a thin beam of light, scientists could study single molecules of proteins and drugs. They might even be able to focus on, and destroy, cancer cells!

Your turn! Write a short story about finding or creating the world’s most perfect diamond. What do you do with it? Sell it? Build a laser? Send your story (500 words or less) to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to: MY DIAMOND, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH 03458. We’ll publish our favorite story in an upcoming issue.

Synthetic -- Produced in a laboratory or factory
Hard X-ray -- Light with a wavelength between .10 and .010 nanometers
Wavelength -- The distance between one peak or crest of a wave of light, heat, or other energy and the next corresponding peak or crest

You didn’t feel the Earth shaking on February 27, 2010 unless you happened to be in Chile. But the sudden violence of an earthquake there affected more than just the victims’ lives. The quake altered the balance and spin of the Earth itself. “The Chilean quake shifted enough material to change the mass balance of our entire planet,” says Richard Gross of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

Earthquakes aren’t the only thing that can mess with Earth’s balance or spin. Wind and tides affect the planet’s spin by much more than the Chilean earthquake, which only shortened your day by a completely unnoticeable 1.26 microseconds. And Earth’s mass balance is always changing as ice melts and continents shift. But mass changes usually happen slowly, not quickly!

Chile’s disaster was a thrust earthquake, meaning that one crustal plate suddenly slid beneath another, carrying tons of rock and dirt closer to the core of the Earth. To envision what this means, imagine a figure skater spinning on ice. If she pulls in her arms, she speeds up. If she pulls in only one hand, she speeds up a little and has to change her balance slightly.

The Earth already isn’t perfectly balanced -- there is more land in the northern hemisphere and more water in the southern. So the planet always wobbles as it spins. You can test this effect with a toy top, which has more mass at the top than the bottom. The top of the top traces out a circle as it spins -- the center of that circle is the figure axis. The sudden motion of so much mass beneath Chile moved Earth’s figure axis by about three inches, a change that normally would take as much as a year! So far, these amounts are just estimates. Gross is hard at work trying to measure the actual effect by analyzing Global Positioning system (GPS) signals.

Do three inches really matter when we’re talking about a whole planet? Gross explains, “The antennas we use to track a spacecraft en route to Mars and elsewhere are located on Earth. If our tracking platform shifts, we need to know about it!”

Crustal plates -- Blocks of the rocky crust of the Earth that move horizontally relative to one another

Check out this photo! What in the world is it? If you’re thinking alien spaceships, you’re not alone. When this image first showed up on Hubble’s cameras, lots of astronomers were completely bemused. “At first glance it looks like a four-pointed Kohga Ninja throwing star blade. It’s so weird-looking that you want to call the UFO hotline,” Ray Villard, Hubble News Director, wrote on Discovery News. The mystery object has a long tail like a comet, but is orbiting within the asteroid belt -- not a common hangout for comets. If you zoom in on the bottom of the tail, you see a small white dot offset from an x-shape. Weird!

Analysis of the evidence led astronomers to an exciting hypothesis: This photo is the first image ever taken showing a high-speed, head-on asteroid crash. “If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight,” says David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles.

With all of outer space to fly through, you’d think asteroids could stay out of each other’s way. But they do crash, especially in the crowded asteroid belt. And each crash creates new, smaller asteroids -- the one that wiped out the dinosaurs was just a fragment of one of these collisions.

The space rocks in this picture were traveling over 11,000 miles per hour when they hit -- that’s five times faster than a rifle bullet -- and the crash produced more energy than a nuclear bomb!

Your turn! What name would you give the object in this mysterious picture? Send your idea to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to: X IS FOR ASTEROID, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Oh, wait. It’s already gone.

Everything on Earth, including rocks, air, water, and your own body, is made of elements. Each element has a number, which is equal to the number of protons in its nucleus. This year, element 112 finally got a name: copernicium, after the Polish astronomer Copernicus, who dared to tell the world that the Earth revolved around the Sun. That’s a huge number of protons -- 112! Oxygen has only eight, and gold has 79. Uranium (number 92) is the biggest element you can find in nature; the rest can only be created in a laboratory. This is because heavier elements are less stable, meaning that they tend to decay, or break down, into lighter elements. Elements with numbers in the hundreds may last only a few nanoseconds or less before decaying completely. Hello, copernicium. Oops, goodbye!

Here’s the weird thing. As elements get really big, their survival rates seem to go up a tiny bit. Element 118, also known as ununoctium, lasts less than a millisecond, but elements 114 and 116 last longer than expected. This fact leads some to wonder whether there might be an island of stable, super-heavy elements just waiting to be discovered.

“Even though we’re not quite to the region of stability yet, we see things that can last tens of seconds, close to minutes,” Dawn Shaughnessy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California told LiveScience. “For these kinds of things, a minute is like an eternity.”

Livermore scientists have worked together with a team from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia to discover five new elements: 113, 114, 115, 116, and 118, the largest element ever created. The international team hopes to find the “magic number” of protons or neutrons that would lead to brand new, possibly useful, atoms. Who knows what sort of crazy things you could make with an atom that the universe had never seen before?

When you imagine nuclear waste, you probably think of something glowing green that makes your skin burst and your eyes fall out. This isn’t what radiation really looks like (usually it’s invisible) or what really happens to you after exposure to it (cancer is one possibility). But one thing is certain -- you don’t want radioactive materials anywhere near your body.

The problem is, you can’t just stick radioactive waste in a container and bury it. Groundwater, erosion, and other processes will eventually eat through the container and carry all that harmful radioactivity out into the world. In order to keep the waste safely locked up, scientists need to find a good geographic location, and a good container, called a waste form -- one that won’t leak or break down, even after tens of thousands of years. Many power plants currently use a glass log several feet thick and wrapped in metal. But glass might not be good enough.

Rodney Ewing of the University of Michigan has been working on the waste form problem for decades. “Now, the exciting possibility and the real need is to develop waste forms that match radioactive waste to a material that’s suitable for, and performs well, in the geologic environment,” he explains. In order to expand the role of nuclear power, we need to find better ways to deal with its waste. That means separating the waste, reusing some elements, finding new and creative uses for others, and throwing away the leftovers in the safest way possible.

Ewing’s approach is to lock up radioactive waste inside a mineral, creating a brand new, synthetic material: a crystal jail for radioactivity!

Zircon is a very durable mineral that often naturally contains forms of plutonium, one of the nuclear waste products that scientists are most concerned about. Not only can plutonium be used to make weapons, but it takes 24,500 years to decay down to half of its original size. In order to keep this waste safe from smugglers, as well as rivers and lakes, scientists can make a totally new mineral out of it: “You can synthesize zircon with plutonium, by grinding a mixture of zirconia, silica, and plutonium oxide into a very fine powder, then heating it,” says Ewing. The result is an apricot-colored crystal. This does sound pretty, but for large-scale applications, the newly created zircon would be left as a fine powder or pressed into pellets. Unfortunately, the beautiful crystal structure of zircon can only hold radioactivity prisoner for so long. As plutonium decays, it shoots out alpha particles that bombard the structure from the inside. Eventually, the zircon expands, or even cracks. Jailbreak!

But there’s a solution that involves a totally different kind of mineral: “The surprise with gadolinium zirconate is that it constantly anneals and remains crystalline,” says Ewing. Basically, when plutonium shoots it with alpha particles, gadolinium zirconate (which actually isn’t related to zircon) can repair itself. This discovery of a self-healing material has exciting applications beyond nuclear waste disposal. One day a synthetic mineral like this may protect satellite electronics from cosmic rays!

Anneals -- Heats and then cools off again

Durable -- Capable of withstanding decay