A Buckyegg Breaks Pentagon Rules

Roland Piquepaille writes "Chemists from Virginia and California have cooked a soup of fullerenes which produced an improbable buckyegg. The egg-shaped structure of their 'buckyballs' was a complete surprise for the researchers. In fact, they wanted to trap some atoms of terbium in a buckyball "to make compounds that could be both medically useful and well-tolerated in the body." And they obtained a buckyegg which both violates some chemistry laws and the FIFA soccer laws which were used until the last World Cup. Read more for additional references and a picture of this buckyegg carrying metal molecules."

Comments

Do not click that link at the end!

[Anonymous Coward]

Leads to Rolands blog. He's whoring it again. Don't give him your clickthroughs.

Re:Wha?

[b0r1s]

Definitely above the average story, but should be within the grasp of many.

I was only confused until I realized that the Pentagon in the heading was the shape, not the structure/organization. Then it all made much, much more sense.

Direct link to story

[Yetihehe]

Direct link to story http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=7891

Re:My understanding...

[zrobotics]

I recently took college chem, and if I recall correctly, 'Buckyballs' can actually be made into tubes, which have been used in some nanotech applications. Geometrically, if you were to take a soccer ball/buckyball, cut it in half along the seams, and then add in alternating rows of hexagons and pentagons, it forms a tube with hemispherical ends. It's hard to explain, but here's a link: http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1295 (sorry, no html).

Considering the shape of these tubes, I wonder why an egg-shaped buckyball is so odd...it seems like a very short (i.e. 1-2 rows between the ends) buckytube would approximate an egg shape fairly well. If it is truly egg-shaped, then it isn't a buckyball at all as it isn't carbon-60, but rather is another form of carbon with an entirely different bonding pattern.

Re:Am I one of the few that at least sorta underst

[bladesjester]

Buckyballs are made of pentegon and hexagon formations of carbon atoms (look at a soccer ball. same basic pattern). What's different here is that two of the pentagons are touching, which scientists previously thought could not happen.

I first learned about buckyballs in my college chem classes back in 98 or 99 so I thought this article was actually pretty interesting.

Let's review the letter "S"

[boyfaceddog]

"pentagon rules" are rules made by the Pentagon and miscapitalized.
"pentagon rule" is a rule about pentagon shapes.

"Editor" is a person who knows the difference.

Re:Nice...

[Hockney Twang]

I have a present for you, I've written a greasemonkey script that removes Roland Piquepaille articles from Slashdot. It could probably be used as an Opera userscript, as well, if you don't use Firefox. The first block of code removes section styles, so you don't have to deal with those awful color schemes. But you can just clip that part out if it's not your style.

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// @include http://slashdot.org/*
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