I think it definitely means that the bone breaks first if you load them under equal pressures, and less confidently that the diamond rod breaks first if you suddenly shock it. As an example elsewhere, you don’t want to make the cores of swords out of brittle materials due to them breaking, which is why cast iron sucks. You want a ductile core that is tough (so it can absorb the energy of impacts) and a hard-but-possibly-brittle exterior (so that you can cut and keep an edge).
Plausibly this means you don’t want structural materials to be made out of diamond even if you’d want your teeth to be, at least unless you needed to sustain high loads. It looks to me like (some, stuff like femurs) bone is optimized to be flexible.
I think it definitely means that the bone breaks first if you load them under equal pressures, and less confidently that the diamond rod breaks first if you suddenly shock it. As an example elsewhere, you don’t want to make the cores of swords out of brittle materials due to them breaking, which is why cast iron sucks. You want a ductile core that is tough (so it can absorb the energy of impacts) and a hard-but-possibly-brittle exterior (so that you can cut and keep an edge).
Plausibly this means you don’t want structural materials to be made out of diamond even if you’d want your teeth to be, at least unless you needed to sustain high loads. It looks to me like (some, stuff like femurs) bone is optimized to be flexible.