Four ways science has made our lives better recently: diamonds out of plastic bottles, and more

Here are four Good News stories about how science is making our lives better.

1. Scientists have found a way to create nanodiamonds from PET plastics.

Turning plastic into diamonds sounds like something from a modern fairy tale, but an experiment that was originally designed to better understand the planets known as ice giants – such as Uranus and Neptune – has led to an unexpected discovery.

Scientists were investigating a phenomenon called 'diamond rain', which is thought to form because of the unique mix of elements within these planets.

They ran the experiments using PET plastic, the polymer found in packaging such as water bottles, which is composed of a mix of hydrogen and carbon. The team managed to mimic the process that takes place within the ice giants, by creating high-pressure shockwaves with an optical laser on the plastic.

If you imagine between a million and two million elephants jumping on an object at once, that’s the kind of pressure we’re talking about.

Researchers were excited when this produced tiny synthetic diamonds.

What is really extraordinary is the clarity of the results they saw in the results, says Prof. Dr Dominik Kraus, from the University of Rostock, who participated in the experiments. “A large fraction of the carbon atoms are turned into diamonds, very quickly in a few nanoseconds,”

“Also when the pressure is released, the diamonds remain. And that means that there are ways to recover these and make them applicable and use them maybe for other things,” he told Euronews.

Man-made diamonds share many of the most important properties of natural diamonds, so – as well as being very pretty – these nanodiamonds have potential applications for quantum technology and medicine.

The experiments were set up