A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) led by Professor Loh Kian Ping, Head of the Department of Chemistry at the NUS Faculty of Science, has successfully altered the properties of water, making it corrosive enough to etch diamonds.

• Possible applications in environmentally-friendly degradation of organic wastes to laser-assisted etching of semiconductor or dielectric films.

This was achieved by attaching a layer of graphene on diamond and heated to high temperatures.

Water molecules trapped between them become highly corrosive, as opposed to normal water.

This discovery has wide-ranging industrial applications, from environmentally-friendly degradation of organic wastes to laser-assisted etching of semiconductor or dielectric films.