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Hello, I'm Justin Rowlat. Welcome to Business Daily. And it's time to take up your periodic tables as once again

we examine the chemistry behind the world economy. Today, we turn once more to element number six,

to carbon. And this time, we look at its most immortal form, diamonds. We'll be discovering the latest

cutting-edge research in industrial diamonds.

And we'll hear the yarn of how a small-scale prospector brought down one of the biggest

monopolists in the world. In the winter of 1991, he hauled a drill rig onto the ice of a little

narrow, round lake, drilled it, and bingo he hit a kimberlite,

and that was the death knell for De Beers.

That is all in a sparkling business daily from the BBC.

Today, it's the element we love so much, we just had to have another bite at it, carbon.

We've already heard how carbon provided the fuel for our modern economy and about the exciting

properties of new carbon materials. Well, today, we look at another and more tantalizing carbon

material, the diamond.

To a chemist, they're nothing more than a three-dimensional cubic lattice of carbon atoms,

while to the man on the street, they are the ultimate status symbol.

But that is not all diamonds are.

Just like its cousin graphene, man-made diamonds have remarkable properties

that are opening up a world of new industrial applications.

Leading the way is Element 6, a subsidiary of the famous diamond mining firm De Beers, named after Carbon's place in the periodic table.

I travelled to Element 6's newly opened Research Centre, a big grey warehouse building just outside Oxford,

not somewhere you might immediately imagine has anything to do with diamonds.

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