Buckyballs and footballs

Before the English invented football, there was the buckyball.

Named after the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic dome with the same fundamental symmetry, C60 is third major form of pure carbon after diamond (my other favourite carbon) and graphite.

It also happens to be the roundest and most symmetrical molecule known.

In C60, hexagons and pentagons of carbon link together in a coordinated fashion (just like in a football) to form a hollow geodesic dome with bonding strains equally distributed among the 60 carbon atoms. The recognition for its discovery by Kroto, Curl and Smalley came in the form of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry back in 1996.

As it turns out, C60 and its other fullerene cousins (C70, C84, C28 et al) are endowed with extraordinary chemical and physical properties. They can react with all sorts of elements across the periodic table and free radicals- involving a polymerisation process widely used to make high temperature superconductors. American scientists spent the next decade moulding fullerenes into pipes (nanotubes). Meanwhile, the continental counterparts in the IBM laboratory in Zurich incorporated buckyballs into micro-sized abacus by lining buckyballs onto a multigrooved copper plate, like beads on a string and then manipulated the beads with a scanning tunnelling microscope to perform calculations. A technology that could pave the way for a better computer chip in the future. Move over Microsoft.