Harder Than Diamond? The New Hexagonal Diamond Breakthrough
A 50-year debate, a harder-than-diamond claim, and some very funny peer review drama.
From First Principles
Breaking down science news so it makes sense to curious people everywhere.
A weekly video podcast. Watch, listen, or both.
As Seen On
The Dave Chang Show
Netflix · March 12, 2026
Dave Chang introduces From First Principles to his audience — in his own words.
Clip from The Dave Chang Show, Netflix. Used with reference to our guest appearance.
Featured Coverage
Nobel Prize Deep Dives
Our breakdown of every 2025 Nobel Prize.
Physics
2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
Macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization — the experiments that proved quantum mechanics works at a scale you can hold in your hand.
Physics
2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
Macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization — the experiments that proved quantum mechanics works at a scale you can hold in your hand.
Recent Episodes
All episodes
Artemis II: Deep Dive on the Moon Flyby, Earthset, and Reentry
From Earthset and Earthrise to eclipse shots and skip-entry reentry, this is our full Artemis II deep dive.
Artemis II, Claude Code Leak, iPhone Spyware & Project Hail Mary
Artemis 2, the Claude Code leak, cats as cancer models, leaked iPhone spyware, and the science of Project Hail Mary.
Can AI Help Wake Coma Patients? The Science of Consciousness
A deep dive into how an AI model used real brain data to map coma circuits, predict new mechanisms of unconsciousness, and point to a possible target for restoring wakefulness.
AI Cancer Vaccines, Strange Fish, Ketamine, and Ancient Life
AI-designed dog cancer vaccines, weird fish evolution, ketamine for depression, and how life rebounded after the asteroid.
Can Human Neurons Really Play Doom? The Science Behind Wetware
Did a dish of human neurons really learn to play Doom—or is the wetware story more hype than breakthrough?
5,000-Year-Old Bacteria, Solar Storms, Dogs, and Meta’s AI War
Ancient cave bacteria, solar storms, dog personality genes, and Yann LeCun’s billion-dollar break from Meta AI.
Featured Research
All researchAdversarial AI reveals mechanisms and treatments for disorders of consciousness
Imagine your brain is like a city with millions of roads and traffic systems. When you're awake and conscious, traffic flows in complex, coordinated patterns. In a coma, something has gone wrong — but we've never had a great way to figure out exactly which roads are broken or how to fix them. This study built a very smart AI that learned to tell the difference between 'awake brain' and 'coma brain' by studying hundreds of thousands of brainwave recordings. Then, like a detective, the AI was pitted against a simulated model of the brain to figure out: what changes in the brain's wiring would explain the difference? The AI figured out — on its own, without being told — that two key things go wrong in a coma: a specific circuit deep in the brain (called the basal ganglia indirect pathway) gets disrupted, and the brain's 'braking system' (inhibitory neurons) starts working too hard in the wrong places. The researchers then checked these predictions against real patient data, and both checked out. The AI also suggested that zapping a specific deep brain region with high-frequency electrical pulses might help wake people up — and early evidence from human patients supports this idea.
Gene conversion empowers natural selection in a clonal fish species
Unfortunately, the content of this research abstract could not be accessed due to paywall restrictions. Without being able to read the actual findings about gene conversion in clonal fish species, I cannot provide an accurate explanation of what the researchers discovered or why it matters.
Direct detection of an asteroid’s heliocentric deflection: The Didymos system after DART
NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid moon called Dimorphos in 2022, and scientists have now measured that this impact actually nudged the entire asteroid system slightly off its path around the Sun. This is the first time humans have measurably changed how a celestial body orbits the Sun, proving that we can potentially deflect dangerous asteroids heading toward Earth.
The dynamics of AMPA receptors underlies the efficacy of ketamine in treatment resistant patients with depression
Think of your brain as having billions of tiny locks and keys. One particular lock — called the AMPA receptor — sits on brain cells and helps them talk to each other using the chemical glutamate. In people with hard-to-treat depression, this study found that those locks are less plentiful than normal, especially in emotional brain regions. When doctors gave these patients ketamine, it actually changed how many of those locks were available on the cell surface — and the bigger that change was, the better the patient felt. So ketamine isn't just temporarily numbing pain; it appears to be physically restoring a broken communication system in the brain. The scientists confirmed this by using a special brain scan (PET scan) with a radioactive tracer that literally glows where those AMPA receptor locks are located, letting them count them in real time in living people.
Bulk hexagonal diamond
You probably know that diamonds are made of carbon atoms arranged in a specific pattern—like a perfectly stacked 3D grid. But imagine if those same carbon atoms could be stacked in a slightly different pattern, like a honeycomb, instead of a cube. Scientists have long believed this 'hexagonal diamond' exists because they found hints of it in rocks from meteorite impact sites, suggesting the extreme heat and pressure of a space rock smashing into Earth could create it. But nobody could make it in the lab or prove it was real on its own—until now. These researchers took a special form of super-flat graphite (the stuff in pencils), squeezed it really hard in just the right direction while heating it up, and successfully made millimeter-sized chunks of hexagonal diamond. They confirmed it's real, it's slightly harder than regular diamond, and it holds up to heat really well. Think of it as discovering a new flavor of the hardest material on Earth.
Extremophile survives the transient pressures associated with impact-induced ejection from Mars
Imagine a massive asteroid hitting Mars so hard that it blasts chunks of rock into space - some of these rocks eventually land on Earth as meteorites. Scientists wanted to know: if there were tiny life forms (bacteria) living in those Martian rocks, could they survive the incredible shock of being launched into space? They took one of Earth's toughest bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans (nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium"), and subjected it to the same crushing pressures that would occur during such an impact. Amazingly, most of the bacteria survived pressures that would instantly crush almost any other living thing. This suggests that life could potentially hitchhike between planets on rocks, surviving the violent journey through space.