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News: THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS IN CUBA
A Report by Andrew Collins
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D I A M O N D S

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Bianca
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« Reply #75 on: September 23, 2008, 10:02:54 am »



           










                                     T H E   K A H N   C A N A R Y   D I A M O N D






The Kahn Canary is one of the most famous diamonds in the United States of America. The Kahn Canary weighs 4.25 carats as a rough diamond crystal, is colored yellow and a triangular shape. The Kahn Canary has never been cut to preserve its flawless natural beauty. The "Kahn Canary" Diamond is currently owned by Stanley Kahn of Kahn's Jewelers in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The Kahn Canary ring setting was designed by Henry Dunay of New York and was mounted in an 18K gold and platinum mounting in 1992.

The Kahn Canary diamond has been exhibited at prestigious world wide events and worn by Senator Hillary Clinton at the inaugurations of her husband, Governor Clinton and by the same as President W.J.Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States.


The Kahn Canary diamond was discovered in 1977 by George Stepp. George Stepp was a logger who lived in Carthage, Arkansas and he discovered the diamond on a visit to the Crater of Diamonds State Park. Anything found at the Crater of Diamonds State Park may be kept by the person who discovered it regardless of the value of the stone. George Stepp therefore sold the diamond to Stanley Kahn of Kahn's Jewelers in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The color of the diamond was a vivid canary yellow - hence the name: Kahn Canary Diamond.


The Kahn Canary was discovered in 1977 at the Crater of Diamonds State Park which is located in South-West Arkansas near Murfreesboro. The name of the man who discovered the diamond was George Stepp who was a logger who lived in Carthage, Arkansas.

The rough diamond crystal weighed 4.25 carats and was colored a vivid yellow.

George Stepp sold the diamond to Stanley Kahn of Kahn's Jewelers in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In order to to preserve its flawless natural beauty the decision was made not to cut the diamond.

But it required a special setting so that the Kahn Canary diamond could be worn as a piece of jewelry.

Stan Kahn contacted the talented designer Henry Dunay to undertake this task. Henry Dunay was born on May 1 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey and served a seven year apprenticeship with a master goldsmith and was vastly experienced in jewelry design. It was imperative to preserve its natural, uncut form.

The Kahn Canary diamond was a perfect symbol to represent Arkansas which has the nickname of
“The Natural State.”

The Arkansas inspired ring setting designed by Henry Dunay reflected the natural type of contours found in Arkansas and was mounted in an 18K gold and platinum ring setting.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2008, 10:18:43 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #76 on: September 23, 2008, 10:04:38 am »




                       














                                       Hillary Clinton and the Kahn Canary Diamond 






The Kahn Canary diamond was a perfect, natural symbol of Arkansas.

Her husband, Bill Clinton, was Governor of Arkansas.

Stan Kahn loaned the Arkansas-inspired ring to Senator Hillary Clinton to wear at both the Inaugurations of
Governor Clinton and President W.J. Clinton as the 42nd President of the United States.

Mrs. Hillary Clinton also wore the Kahn Canary again in 1997 for Presindent Clinton's second Inauguration.





Spectacular in its raw form, this uncut, triangular-shape yellow diamond gem has been on exhibit at many cities around the U.S. and overseas.

The diamond was featured in an illustrious jewelry exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1997 that included precious stones from throughout the world including gems from the Kremlin collection, the Vatican, Cartier and Christies.

And, in late 1997, the Kahn Canary was featured in another prestigious exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York entitled The Nature of Diamonds.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2008, 10:23:43 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #77 on: October 08, 2008, 06:28:20 pm »



 
               

The axes were fashioned from the second-hardest mineral known to science

(Neolithic corundum axe Image:
Peter Lu)









                                                  Chinese Made First Use of Diamond






May 18, 2005
BBC

Stone age craftsmen in China were polishing jade objects using diamond 2,000 years before anyone else had the same idea, new evidence suggests.

Quartz was previously thought to be the abrasive used to polish ceremonial axes in late stone age, or neolithic, China.

But the investigations of a Chinese-US team of scientists indicate that quartz alone would not have been able to achieve such lustrous finishes.

The team reports its diamond findings in the journal Archaeometry.

Harvard University physicist Peter Lu and colleagues studied four ceremonial burial axes, the oldest of which dates to about 4,500 years ago.

The team used X-ray diffraction and electron microprobe analysis. This determined that the most abundant mineral in the axes was corundum, known as ruby in its red form and sapphire in all other colours.
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« Reply #78 on: November 19, 2008, 11:53:33 am »










                                          US has Sun King's stolen gem, say French experts






   
Richard Ingham And
Marie-pierre Ferey –
Tue Nov 18, 2008
AFP/File

PARIS (AFP) – French experts said on Tuesday they had proof that the Hope Diamond, a star exhibit in Washington's Smithsonian Institution, is a legendary gem once owned by King Louis XIV that was looted in
the French Revolution.

New evidence unearthed in France's National Museum of Natural History shows beyond reasonable doubt that
the Hope Diamond is the same steely-blue stone once sported by the Sun King, they said.

Mineralogist Francois Farges, heading an investigation published in a peer-reviewed French journal, told AFP he
was now "99 percent sure" that the Hope and the mythical Blue Diamond of the Crown were one and the same.

"The evidence corroborates a scenario under which the diamond, after being stolen in Paris in 1792, was swiftly smuggled to London, where it was recut," he said.

The Blue Diamond came from a massive, 115.6-carat blue-tinged stone mined in the kingdom of Golconda, in India's Hyderabad state.

In the mid-17th century, a French adventurer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased the stone from Golconda's ruler and then sold it on to Louis XIV.

The Sun King then ordered the court jeweller, Sieur Pitau, to make him a piece to remember.

After two years' work, Pitau presented his sovereign with a triangular-shaped 69-carat gem the size of a pigeon's egg that took the breath away as it snared the light, reflecting it back in bluish-grey rays.

At the diamond's dazzling heart was a Sun with seven facets -- the Sun being Louis' emblem, and seven being a number rich in meaning in biblical cosmology, indicating divinity and spirituality.

In 1749, Louis' descendant, Louis XV, had the Blue Diamond reworked as the centre piece of one of the most fabulous pieces of jewellery ever made, a ceremonial item called "The Order of the Golden Fleece."

It featured a 107-carat ruby carved into the shape of a dragon, which breathed out couvetous "flames," comprising 84 red-painted diamonds, in the direction of a fleece, consisting of 112 diamonds painted yellow.

After Louis XVI tried to flee revolutionary France, the French crown jewels were sequestered by the revolutionary regime and held in a mansion on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where they were stolen in a five-day spree by
a gang in September 1792.

From then on, the Blue Diamond was never seen or heard of again.

But suspicions began to be aroused in 1812, when a massive blue stone of 45.54 carats was attributed to a
London diamond merchant, Daniel Eliason.

Its next known owner was a British banker, Henry Philip Hope. The diamond showed up in his catalogue, but with
no details of its provenance.

After Hope's death, the gem was bequeathed to his nephew and ultimately the nephew's grandson, who sold it to pay off debts. In the 20th century, it passed into American hands and eventually was donated by Harry Winston Inc. of New York to the Smithsonian in 1958.

In the study, appearing in the journal Revue de Gemmologie, Farges' team recount how, in December 2007, they found a lead model of the Blue Diamond in the archives of the National Museum of Natural History.

The model was made by a Paris jeweller, Charles Achard, whose clients included a "Mr. Hoppe of London."

Using measurements provided by the Smithsonian, the French team used a computer to see how the gems match up, and find that the Hope Diamond fits perfectly inside the Blue Diamond.

"It's more than a hypothesis," said Farges. "We have carried out analyses by scanner and laser, which have been validated by experts in gemology."

Looking at a paper trail of circumstantial evidence, including court testimony by some of the robbers, Farges believes that the gem -- far too conspicuous to be sold in Paris -- was smuggled out of France shortly after
the theft.

It was taken to London where it was recut in what Farges describes as a butchered job, shearing the unique
gem of 23.5 carats as well as its extraordinary lustre.

Eliason, he believes, was just a front for Hope. Eliason went public with ownership of the gem in September 1812, exactly two days after a 20-year statute of limitations for revolutionary crimes had expired.

On its website, the Smithsonian Institution says "strong evidence indicates" the Hope and Blue diamonds are the same stones.

Other scenarios for the Blue Diamond include the theory that revolutionary leader Georges Danton used it to buy
off Austro-Prussian forces that were threatening the young republic.

It ended up in the hands of the British royal family through Caroline of Brunswick, the wife of George IV.

Farges dismissed this scenario as far-fetched and lacking any documented support.

Asked whether France would now ask for the diamond's return, Farges said this was unlikely.

"The diamond has been recut, which means that the one in Smithsonian is a completely different stone," he said.

"In addition, if someone were to ask me if I were 100-percent sure that this was the same diamond, I would be unable to say so, because the nature and chemical composition of the original blue diamond were never recorded."
« Last Edit: November 19, 2008, 11:58:01 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #79 on: December 22, 2008, 06:51:50 am »









                                  Diamond in the rough: Museum finds vacuumed gem






   
Yahoo News
Sun Dec 21, 2008
NEW YORK

– The American Museum of Natural History's latest discovery is a diamond in the rough: a visitor's $15,000 gem in a vacuum-cleaner bag.

The one-carat stone fell out of Catherine Hart's ring during a "Night at the Museum" sleepover event at the storied New York institution Dec. 13 and 14.

Custodial supervisor Herbert Andujar says staffers in gloves and masks combed through the dust in four vacuum bags, scrutinizing everything that glittered, before finding the gem.

Hart says she's thrilled to have recovered the diamond, which her husband gave her in 2000. The 59-year-old intends to give it to her granddaughter someday.

Hart says it shows a diamond really is forever, "because it came back to me."
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« Reply #80 on: March 19, 2009, 11:27:16 am »









                                                 Diamond May Be Life's Birthstone






Michael Schirber
Astrobiology Magazine
SPACE.com
Sept. 25, 2008

One of the hurdles in origin-of-life theories is that the pieces that make up complex biomolecules do not readily come together by themselves. A group of scientists proposes that diamonds provided a kind of "workbench" for biomolecule manufacturing on early Earth.
 
Not long after its formation, our planet was — according to astrobiologists — awash in a primordial soup that contained the rudimentary ingredients of life. The fly in the "soup" theory, however, is that the small molecular bits likely needed outside help in order to latch together into the long, complex biomolecules that living organisms use.


Some scientists have suggested that the surfaces of minerals on the early Earth provided an organizing platform upon which the building blocks of life could assemble.� Recent studies of diamond suggest that its surface would be especially good for this.


"Diamond is totally non-toxic, an excellent biomaterial and certainly the only naturally existing material that is completely biocompatible on all levels — presumably the best of all possible platforms for the formation of life," said Andrei Sommer from the University of Ulm in Germany.


Sommer and his colleagues discovered that a certain type of diamond, called hydrogenated diamond, imposes a rigid order on molecules near its surface. They suggest, in a recent issue of the journal Crystal Growth and Design, that this diamond-mediated order helped fit together the pieces that led to the emergence of life. [This news story was reported by LiveScience.]
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« Reply #81 on: March 19, 2009, 11:28:10 am »










Frozen with fear



Hydrogenated diamonds are just diamonds with an outer coating of hydrogen atoms, but they are not something you'll find in your local jewelry shop. In fact, the only hydrogenated diamonds currently known are all made in the lab.


"In nature, diamond hydrogenation is likely to occur in or in the vicinity of volcanoes known to emit a variety of hot gases including hydrogen," Sommer said. The early Earth had so much volcanic activity that he thinks it is highly probable that hydrogenated diamonds existed back then.


Sommer and his collaborators previously showed that hydrogenated diamond is very hydrophobic, or "water fearing" — meaning it pushes water away. When hydrogenated diamond is wetted, the water molecules line up on the surface as if they were frozen into a crystal layer (an analogy might be static electricity making all the hairs on your head point out).


Surprisingly, these crystal water layers do not disappear when the hydrogenated diamond is fully immersed in water. Because this is the only natural material known to exhibit this behavior, Sommer's team proposes that small organic molecules in the primordial soup landed on hydrogenated diamond and were helped by its robust crystal water layers into linking together to form proteins and DNA.


Support for this idea comes from a recent study that found that certain nucleobases (the building blocks of DNA and RNA) form an organized pattern on the surface of graphite, which is chemically similar to diamond.


Hydrogenated diamond should be a better organizing platform than graphite, Sommer said. This is because the crystal layers that form on it are not static; they change with temperature and light intensity. The resulting fluctuations could have helped drive the development of novel molecules in the primordial soup.
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« Reply #82 on: March 19, 2009, 11:29:52 am »










Primordial bling-bling


"So far, crystal water layers have only been described on hydrogenated diamond," said Horst-Dieter Foersterling of Philipps University of Marburg, who was not involved with this work. "This is a new field of research. That this system can be helpful for the formation of biomolecules is a plausible hypothesis."


It remains uncertain whether there was any hydrogenated diamond on Earth billions of years ago, but even a little bit might be enough.


"I think it is not important that a lot of hydronenated diamond was available," Foersterling said. "Once the first evolution process has started in a very special location [such as a tiny patch of hydrogenated diamond], and stable DNA strands have formed, a special location is no more necessary."
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« Reply #83 on: May 12, 2009, 07:48:37 pm »









                                            Vivid blue diamond sells for $12.4m







Geneva,
Switzerland
| May 13, 2009
Reuters


A FLAWLESS vivid blue diamond weighing 7.03 carats has sold for a record 10.5 million Swiss francs ($12.4 million), the highest price paid per carat for any gemstone at auction.

The rectangular-shaped blue stone went to an anonymous buyer bidding by telephone after hectic bidding see-sawed between two callers for 15 minutes.

It was the centrepiece of Sotheby's semi-annual sale in Geneva.

The stone sets a record price for any gemstone sold at auction of $1,763,869 per carat, Sotheby's said.

The previous record price for a fancy vivid blue diamond was $10.3 million for a stone weighing 6.04 carats at sale in Hong Kong in October 2007.

The new owner will have the right to name the stone, which is mounted in a platinum ring.

It was put up for sale by London-listed Petra Diamonds, which extracted it last year from the historic Cullinan mine in South Africa.

Blue diamonds are only known to come from the South African mine.

Another famous stone from the mine, the Great Star of Africa, is owned by the British royal family.

Blue are the rarest of the diamond family after reds.
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« Reply #84 on: May 22, 2009, 12:19:04 pm »








                                            Tycoon names blue diamond "Star of Josephine"

         




MAY 22, 2009
GENEVA
(Reuters)

– A Hong Kong property tycoon and collector who bought a flawless blue diamond for a record $9.5 million, has named it the "Star Of Josephine", auction house Sotheby's said Wednesday.

Joseph Lau Luen-Hung made the winning bid last week by telephone for the diamond, which fetched the highest price per carat for any gemstone at the auction and a world record price for a fancy vivid blue diamond at auction.

"Mr. Lau has already exercised his right to name the diamond, which is now known as 'Star of Josephine'," it said.

The rectangular-shaped blue stone weighs 7.03 carats, about the size of a small coin, and was the rarest to enter the international market this year.

David Bennett, chairman of Sotheby's jewelry department in Europe and the Middle East, told reporters after conducting the May 12 sale in Geneva: "I hope it will be worn, it is such a beautiful stone."

Lau is chairman of Chinese Estates, a major Hong Kong property developer.



(Reporting by
Stephanie Nebehay;

Editing by
Farah Master)
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