Eddy's Good News: Diamonds are forever and first female architect in Pakistan focuses on emergency housing

Virgin Radio

8 Sep 2022, 09:22

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Thursday 8th September 2022

Mind Blowing news from Germany where they are now making diamonds out of plastic bottles, it sounds unfeasible, unbelievable but it’s happening and here’s how:

Say guten morgen to Rostock University who’ve had a breakthrough in the manufacture of synthetic diamonds which are useful for all sorts of things, like that diamond drill bit that goes through even bathroom tiles.

Diamonds are basically carbon that’s been put under massive pressure and in the past these tiny diamonds were made using explosives, but now they can make them by shooting PET plastic with a laser beam. They took a thin sheet that was used as food packaging and blasted it for a microsecond with a laser that heated it up to over 6,000 degrees centigrade. All it took was a few billionths of a second at a weight equal to millions of times Earth’s atmospheric pressure for the carbon in that plastic to reconfigure into tiny nano-diamonds.

Amazing huh!? Making something super useful from plastic bound for the ocean is a huge win. 

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Some much needed good news from flood stricken Pakistan as its first female architect has focused her talents on emergency housing for those millions displaced.

Say hello to Yasmeen Lari, who’s now 81 and who came out of retirement in 2005 when Pakistan experienced those awful earthquakes. She’s famous for sleek, modern, buildings that have enhanced the skylines of cities around the world but she’s now looking at something every different. Quick, sustainable emergency housing is the aim and Yasmeen has wrapped her brilliant brain around the problem of how to build houses, quick and with what? Bricks and mortar take too much time and are too expensive so she’s designed homes using something that is free and abundant and which grows as fast as, well, bamboo! 

She’s designed little homes from prefabricated bamboo that are so simple and efficient that a small team of five people from Yasmeen’s sustainability non profit can put up eight of them in one day and they’ve made a Youtube tutorial video so others can do the job easily with no training.

Via: YouTube