Word: carbonations
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...Carbon is a kind of natural backbone: the all-important element that anchors the molecules of everything from crude oil to DNA. For the past six years, groups of scientists have been chasing down an exotic form of carbon believed to have a particularly elegant configuration: 60 atoms of carbon arranged like a miniature soccer ball. The improbably spherical molecules were dubbed buckminsterfulleren es, or simply buckyballs, because they resemble the geodesic domes designed by inventor Buckminster Fuller. Researchers knew that some sort of 60-atom carbon molecule existed, but they had trouble producing enough of the stuff to study...
...scientists, the discovery of buckyballs has been like stumbling across % an unexpected cache of buried treasure. Only two other distinctive forms of pure carbon have ever been found: ordinary graphite and precious diamonds. The atom clusters in graphite are flattened into hexagons, like tiles on a bathroom floor, while the atoms in diamonds form tiny pyramids. The molecular structure of buckyballs is so radically different that researchers hope this third form of carbon will lead to a whole new class of materials with a multitude of uses...
...first known encounter with a buckyball was recorded in 1985 by Richard Smalley, a chemical physicist at Rice University, and Harold Kroto, a British chemist from the University of Sussex who was visiting Smalley's lab. The two scientists were studying what would happen if they heated carbon vapor to about 8,000 degreesC (14,500 degrees F). Unexpectedly, they detected a mysterious new form of carbon. Chemical tests proved two things: 1) the molecules had 60 carbon atoms, and 2) they had no "edges," as chemists call the unpaired electrons that cause atoms to form chemical bonds with...
...Berkeley team got around that problem by "grabbing" the whirling buckyballs with atomic "handles" containing the element osmium. The handles enabled the scientists to manipulate billions of buckyballs and align them in an orderly, crystalline fashion. By bombarding the carbon samples with a thin beam of X rays, the Berkeley scientists got an accurate computer representation of the soccer ball-like arrangement of the atoms...
SCIENCE: Great balls of carbon! And great ways to use them...