Some people prefer American soccer over Australian, but I prefer NANO-SIZED! Buckyballs (nano-sized soccer-ball-like carbon cages) have been making headlines this week as researchers from Rice University and Sandia National Laboratory successfully videotaped the creation of a buckyball. Watch it here: Nature produces nano-sized soccer balls which scientists have dubbed buckyballs. Buckyballs (more generally called fullerenes) are made up of 60 carbon atoms all put together just like American soccer balls: twelve pentagons (the black patches) and twenty hexagons (the white patches) linked together into a cage formation. I won’t go into it all, but go to Nova’s webpage for a very entertaining and precise history and description of the buckyball, with no science jargon: http://www.science.org.au/nova/024/024key.htm But hold your horses, sports fans. The video doesn’t make any sense until you read the paper published about it. Luck for you, I’ve done the dirty work.
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