I was reading an article in The Age today about how diamonds could be the key to developing bionic eyes. The article said that is takes 3.3 billion years for nature to create a diamond, but physics professor Steven Prawer is able to make them in 5 days, by cooking them in the microwave. My first image was of Prawer running to the microwave to stop his wife from trying to defrost dinner because his diamond was not done yet. After that thought passed I decided to be amazed at how somebody thought to try doing this in the first place. However this is just side speculation because what I actually learnt today was that surgeons who replace heart values or hips, among other things, coat the item that they are installing with a diamond coating because it has a very low rejection rate and is quite durable. This also amazed me and got me thinking of the versatile use of a girl's jewelry. It can be a pretty ornament for years, but if she becomes a pensioner who is a little low on cash, she can then grind it down and use it to coat her replacement hip.
This topic further reminded about those warning emails that went around years ago and possibly still do now. It was usually told from the first person perspective about how this person landed in a foreign country and met somebody there who took them out to a great bar where they had an amazing night of fun, only to wake up the next morning in a bath of ice with their kidneys removed. These thoughts combined got me to thinking that using diamond coating on hip replacements must have been a well kept secret up until The Age revealed it this morning, because if it hadn't been a secret, then there would have surely been warning emails about people waking up with their hips missing. However now that the secret is revealed, you better pass the word that anyone who has had a hip replacement and travels to a foreign country should be wary, or they might wake up in a bath of ice with their hips and kidneys missing!
The article was in The Age.
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