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It Came From Beyond ... In Buckyballs!
ooky writes: "Scientists at NASA have claimed to have found conclusive proof that gases from outside the solar system can arrive on Earth (and other planets, presumably) in neat little buckyball cages! They've found a type of helium 3 that does not exist (nor, presumably, has ever existed) in our solar system in these fullerene packages, deposited in a layer around the Earth dating from the 65 MYBP dino-killing asteroid collision. Some of our own atmosphere may have arrived this way during the Age of Bombardment! For more info on buckyballs and what they are, see here and here." The article is boundingly enthusiastic rather than the least bit skeptical, so take it with a few mols of (fullerinzed) sodium chloride. Still ...
...is not to find theories that are true, but rather to find theories that are less wrong.
Scientists understand this. It is the mass media, and the general populace who do not. Scientists are charged with creating models that are more accurate than the previous model. They understand that it too will be replaced by an even more accurate model in time.
Science says nothing of truth. We do not "know" that our laws of physics are "right" or "true". All we do know is that they fit the data very well. That's really all that we can ever hope for: to fit the data. If a theory or model fits the data, then it is useful and we use it.
This is a rather subtle point, that I think is lost on the masses. I think that most lack the scientific education needed to really grasp this. At this point, I could go off on a rant about American education, but I'll leave that to other Slashdot readers.
Still, your point is well taken. People that buy into the current theory wholesale are misleading themselves. However, I maintain that scientists don't buy into them wholesale. They know that such theories are fleeting. Its the largely uneducated media who distorts the picture.
--Lenny
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Several years ago, I took an Organic Chemistry course. Very cool stuff..
One of the conclusions I came away with is pretty obvious: The more geometrically balanced a molecule is, the more stable it is. Typically, more stable molecules are also harder to create. Entropy tends to dictate lower energy structures.
Think of a water molecule. It has a positive dipole where the Oxygen sits, and a negative dipole where the hydrogen sits. The number of electrons in a bond, and the charges of the atoms involved dictate a certain geometry to the molecule.
A buckyball is pretty much spherical, composed of cyclohexane and cyclopentane (six and five-carbon rings) like a soccer ball. This is a very stable structure. It would take tremendous energy to break it. Contrast most other hydrocarbons, like octane, which are long chains of carbon, and are easily broken.
So using buckminsterfullerene to deliver Oxygen to charcoal is not going to work well. But, what it is being considered for is the encapsulation of radio-active isotopes for injection into the human body, for example. This way, a radioactive tracer is still useful, but keeps the bad stuff confined, and not bonding with other molecules.
As a side note, Arthur C. Clarke proposes that bucky-tubes (buckyballs, openned and connected with nanotubes - built up from individual atoms by nanites) could be used to make extremely long, extremely strong and extremely light cables for building an elevator to orbit.
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If you don't know what a Bucky Ball is, Here's a VRML model of one that you can look at in your browser.
There is also another way to produce 4He that, while insignificant on a cosmic scale, accounts for most of the 4He in the earth's crust. It turns out that an alpha-particle is nothing but a 4He nucleus, and so alpha-decay produces helium as a byproduct. On earth, helium produced this way gets trapped in pockets in the crust (much like natural gas), and so can't escape into space. Atmospheric helium, on the other hand, tends to escape into space. So, what you have is helium in the atmosphere (including most of the 3He-laden primordial helium) escaping into space, and being replaced by helium produced in radioactive decay (which doesn't produce 3He at all), and that, I believe, is why the abundance of 3He on the earth is lower than in the solar system at large.
-rpl
"Bucky Shuttle" Memory Device: Synthetic Approach and Molecular Dynamics Simulations,
there are also MPEG simulations available here: Simulation of a nanotube-based memory element.
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The press release can be found here: http://george.arc.na sa.gov/dx/basket/pressrelease/00_20AR.html
A preview of the article will be posted at: http://www.pnas.org
It is research so it should be peer reviewed. But the source seems good.
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At Michigan State University, they are theorizing about doubled Bucky Balls, connected with a nanotube (Like a Tylenol capsule). A charged particle sits inside, and determines a value based on which half of the bucky-capsule it sits. According to the poster on the wall, the RAM will use no power to store information, only power to read and change data.
I tried very hard to find a URL, for this, but the closest I can do is: http://www.cse.msu.edu
It is the URL for the department where the poster is hanging on the wall.
It'd be nice for some space gasses to contain these since they would be nearly impossible to mass produce. Does anyone have any other ideas for resources that might be gained from the gas?
Sure you can trap just about anything inside a buckyball, current trends are focused on trying to trap large metal atoms inside them in the hope of producing superconductors.
Traped Oxygen wouldn't cause bucky balls to burn all that well... Buckyballs are _very_ stable (Surviving ground zero of a planet killer impact) the amount of energy you would need to pump into one of these to burn would probably be more that you would get out... That said i can't confirm that this is the case as i do not have the data to hand.
Just thought I'd pass along some interesting information.... The buckyball (or buckminsterfullerene) is technically termed isocahedral C60. It's a molecule made up of 60 carbon atoms arranged to form a sphere consisting of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. It was discovered by Richard Smalley and Harry Kroto, and named after Buckminster Fuller for his work on the geodesic dome, which it resembles. Furthermore, the buckyball is an insolator, but can be "doped" to make what is called a dopyball. Scientists crack open the ball with lasers, add other elements (potassium, rubidium, thallium, etc...), and reseal the ball. This is VERY similar to how silicon wafers are doped. These dopyballs are superconductors, but they don't follow most of the traditional rules (i.e., temperature and energy relations, etc). Perhaps superstrong, supercheap (you can make them at home...sort of) computer components can be made from them... think of the possibilities!
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Most helium around comes from fusing hydrogen in stars, and ends up as Helium 4. 'Stardust' as Joni Mitchell would have it. Helium 3 on the other hand, has been lurking around since the big bang. Like, 'cosmic', man.
Yahoo (and the Slashdot story) has it wrong in that the helium is extraterristial NOT necessarily from outside the solar system. He3 is in fact found in the solar wind: the crust of the moon, for example, is thought to enriched in He3 from the solar wind.
He3 does exist on earth (and in the rest of the Solar System for that matter). What is different is the ratio of He4 to He3 on Earth and in most of the rest of the solar system. What the article should say is that
1) Helium is trapped inside Bucky-balls found in asteriod impact sites and 2) The He4 to He3 ratio is the same as the ratio in the rest of the solar system and is not the same as that on earth.
This implies that 1) Buckyballs formed in space 2) They can trap gases in them and 3) They can survive extremely violent impact.
Slashdot - please, please, please check the original sources for stories.