I sure hope Less isn't doing jury duty. It is beautiful today

Hi all,
It is Friday! It's a stunning day weather-wise here in Seattle, and lots of progress on multiple fronts, so lets get started!

Amora Gem Updates:

3 weeks and counting… No news from CTHR regarding their possible response to the USPTO. Thus, we're down to 3 weeks remaining. If they do respond, I expect it will be in the last two weeks simply as a way to maximally delay things, but we're at least getting closer to the deadline of July 30.

Equipment delays: The other issue beyond the patent situation is of course our production. Currently we are still waiting on a key piece of equipment that has been delayed for well over a month…hope to have that shortly, but this is very likely to push back production until the Fall, patent or not.

RingExplorer.com and Amora Gem: There was a question posted last week asking about whether RingExplorer would offer Amora gem rings. Two answers here:

1 - RingExplorer is effectively like Google, a search engine, but designed expressly for rings and bands. Thus, it encompasses rings from many sellers, but you still go to the underlying vendor to purchase…much like Google can help you find a place to purchase something, but you don't purchase it from Google.

2 - RingExplorer has been built to account for Amora Gem You can select 'center stone material' or 'side stone material' for example and check Amora Gem to search on resulting rings.

See the screenshot below:


Note that until Amora Gem is available however, the search results will turn up empty…but Amora GEM has been integrated into RingExplorer.

General BTD News:

DiamondBistro.com - substantial improvements: This week was a big week for DiamondBistro, and I'll summarize all the improvements below:

1 - New, more modern interface - We've retooled the website interface for a much cleaner and more modern look

2 - Embedded videos now supported - You can put up to 4 videos in your listings, making it easier than ever to show all the details of your item.

3 - Paypal 'purchase' button can be added to your listing automatically - You can now enable a paypal 'purchase' button in your listing if you want to take paypal for payment. This adds a purchase button right on your listing, and the buyer simply clicks to make payment. After you receive payment, mark the item as sold and the purchase button is auto-disabled. This should greatly simplify selling in terms of avoiding the payment details emails for your listings.

4 - New dedicated email server - We've moved all the email handling between users of diamondbistro (i.e. a possible buyer emailing a seller about a listing) to a dedicated email server, that implements a number of specific protocols including DKIM and SPF to ensure messages get delivered.

In fact, we now have a control panel that tracks all outgoing emails and confirms delivery, and we're at 100% delivery ever since we made the change.

5 - Move to paid listings - all of the above improvements are the result of our changing over to .99cents listing fees, instead of being a free site as before.

That change over happened on Sunday and besides helping pay for the above improvements, it's also helped free us from having to weed out all the spam type listings (i.e. work at home 'opportunities', etc) that used to plague the site and required manual removal.

Overall, lots of improvements and accordingly, this week we hit a new record of online users at 612 online at one time…which is more than double the traffic peak of our message boards believe it or not!

Take a look and see what you think - DiamondBistro.com


RingExplorer.com - coming next week: We're currently moving over the site from our development server to the live cloud server and hoping to do the alpha launch next Friday. This means you'll be able to try it out and play around with it, just realize that as an alpha launch, it means there's still lots of polishing and fixing to be done. But, you can get a feel for it and start using it soon and we greatly encourage you to post feedback on the boards as you use it to help guide its refinement.

This week we were able to add two additional features - support for the 'matching band' / 'matching ring' tab. Thus, if a ring you are viewing has a matching band, it will show under the 'matching band' tab and you can thus simply click and view.

In addition, the video tab is now enabled though most rings don't have this info updated. But, videos for that ring or band are viewable under this tab allowing you to watch the videos directly in place.

As noted, we're hoping to put it out live for an alpha preview next week and look forward to you having a chance to start testing it out!


Misc: Fundamentals of Matter - What makes a yellow diamond…yellow?


Today we're going to really put a lot of what we've covered previously into practical use and discuss yellow diamonds as a first example of colored gems.

To refresh, last week we discussed how a colorless crystal meant that it's electrons were all bonded with at least 3.1 eV (electron volts). As a result, the electrons are all gripped tight enough that the energy of visible light waves does not affect them, and hence the crystal is transparent/colorless.

So, take the yellow diamond below in the center of this ring:



Because your eyes see yellow in the center diamond above, the first thing we know is that not all of it's electrons are bound greater than 3.1eV. Since pure diamond normally binds it's electrons at roughly 5.4 eV (colorless), we know something is different with this diamond vs. a theoretical perfect/pure diamond.

That something is the inclusion of Nitrogen inside the diamond's framework (lattice). Not much nitrogen is required….potentially only 1-10 Nitrogen atoms per 1 Million carbon atoms is enough to add visible yellow color.

Now, the fact that Nitrogen inside a diamond makes it yellow is likely common knowledge here.

But, *why* nitrogen makes it yellow is something many people don't know, and that's really the topic today.

There's two aspects to breakdown to explain how the yellow color is created.

First, visible light, or white light, is in fact what provides color to all things. The color white as noted earlier, is not an actual color - rather white light, or simply what we term light, is created by an even amount of at least 3 evenly spaced spectral colors. For ease of understanding, lets focus on white light created by even amounts of red, green and blue.

Each of these colors are created by photons moving with specific energy levels, resulting in different wavelengths. The illustration below shows this with red having a longer and less energetic wave pattern, green having a tighter more energetic one and blue having the most energy:


With that clarified, lets go back to our yellow diamond. Diamonds are made of carbon, and carbon atoms have 4 free electrons that can bond, and in diamond, all 4 are bonded tightly resulting in a colorless crystal.

Nitrogen, however, has 5 free electrons. So, when a nitrogen atoms slides into the growing diamond, it uses 4 electrons to bind the same way as a carbon atom does….except, it has 1 electron left over, with nowhere to bond.

This free electron hangs around but without being bonded, it's able to move much more freely than most electrons inside a diamond.

And it is this free electron that is key to changing the typically white diamond to yellow.

When 'light' hits our yellow diamond, it's really even amounts of red/green/blue all hitting the diamond.

For a white diamond, the electrons are all bound up at greater energy than visible light. Therefore, since none of the electrons interact with this light, the diamond also reflects back/transmits the same even amounts of red/green/blue, and we thus see it as white or colorless.

For our yellow diamond, however, each extra electron attached to the Nitrogen atom is not so tightly bound - it's bound more loosely so that some higher energy wavelengths can interact with it, and thus these electrons are able to 'jump' and absorb the energy from the blue (higher energy) portions of visible light to do so. The electrons literally jump to a higher orbital using the energy from the blue spectrum to do so.

And as a result, the reflected light spectrum from this diamond is no longer an even mix of red/green/blue (or white). Instead, a lot of the blue light is absorbed, and so only red and green wavelengths are returned.

When you combine red + green light returning in equal parts, you get: Yellow.

And thus, you see this as a yellow diamond rather than white

That is the why behind why nitrogen can change a white diamond to yellow. There's actually more info related to white diamonds and nitrogen that is of interest, but we'll save that for another time.

For now, you'll likely have more knowledge than many jewelers as to the why, behind yellow diamonds!

Next week - no weekly update! My jury duty is still up in the air next week, so I'm going to pre-emptively cancel next weeks update and lets just plan on resuming two Friday's from now, on Friday the 20th unless I really get held up by Jury duty.

Have a great weekend,
Less

The fall isn't too bad, I would love to unwrap an Amora gem for Christmas

As always, great update

I'm totally yoinking that explanation for my quantum class... with credit due of course

Very cool, Less. I can't wait to read your book, all these great articles in one place. I hope if you do get selected for jury duty, it is an interesting, but short case. I've done jury duty a couple of times and found it to be amazing to actually see a court in action. Not to mention the theater of the whole thing.

You know, whenever I read the word "Amora" I think "Amora Gem" and then there's a voice in my head going "MIIIIIIIIIINE!" I can't wait to get my hands on them!

Less mentioned "equipment delays" and I'm wondering if that is what is holding up Robot cutting for the RB sapphires that were supposed to have been available in June?

This is my question, too! I need a vivid pink!!!

This is what Less said about the sapphires:

http://betterthandiamond.com/discussion/...apphires#UNREAD


We're behind schedule and so I don't expect the sapphires to be ready until July...however, they are coming. We do have the rough and it looks fantastic, and the initial test cuts look excellent.

The holdup? Because of the sudden news on the US patent front related to the Amora gem meant that we had to re-prioritize Mr. Robot and start getting him ready for Amora Gem production sooner than expected...so until the work is done, we had to push off the sapphires.

We are looking at getting a second robot so we can avoid this kind of a choke point in the future, but until he is done with his current pre-Amora gem tests, we don't have a free robot to work on the sapphires.

Anyway, that's the scoop - apologies for the delay but things have been happening faster than expected on the Amora GEM front.

I'll have more news on the sapphires within the next two weeks.

Hope that helps,
Less
_________________________
Recipient: GIA Diamonds Certificate

President,
http://BetterThanDiamond.com

Good Morning LoveMSR,

You were up late last night!

Thanks for posting that info. I missed it initially. The news is not so bad, since it means Amora production is starting sooner than we had anticipated. I want both and will be over-the-moon when I have either one in my chubby little fingers!