A team of researchers in northern China developed the world’s hardest glassy material, the transparent, yellow-tinted AM-III, which is capable of leaving a deep scratch on the surface of a diamond, a report from South China Morning Post explains.
The material, which is made entirely of carbon, reached a 113 gigapascals (GPa) on the Vickers hardness test. As a point of reference, natural diamonds usually score somewhere between 50 and 70 on the GPa scale.