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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."
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Way to throw out a completely misleading headline there, Roland. "Pentagon Rules" makes it sound like some sort of government security issue. Add that to the barely intelligible article summary and we've got another bang-up article by the Pipsqueak blogger. At least he's back to linking his own shitty blog articles again, so we're further justified calling him out for his blatant slashvertisments. Zonk, either stop approving this shit, or give us a separate category for articles from Roland so we can remove them from our fucking front pages. Forget the stupid ajaxified comment system, I want to be able to filter articles based on submittor.
i refuse to give roland any clickthroughs and thus didn't read the story but i do large molecule chemical research for a living so i have an idea what's going on here. you are on-target, any disparity in symmetry of a buckyball will cause odd strains to occur in the lattice which will surely cause a correspondingly non-symmetrical charge distribution on the molecule surface. the resulting charge separation may not qualify according to the classical definition of a 'polar molecule' but a dipole would be observed which would probably cause the molecules to mostly align at some lowered temperature similar to the molecular arrangement which occurs in an LCD display. as such, i would expect some charge separation on the surface but would not expect the molecule to maintain a non-neutral charge as a whole. Further, trapped molecules will no doubt respond to the native surface charge distribution but also note that thermal energy will also cause the trapped molecule(s) to likewise interact with the bulk carbon surface which will also affect surface charge.
I don't think it's anything to do with charge. Each intersection of the picture of the molecule represents a carbon atom. Even when you break the isolated pentagon rule, each carbon atom is still only connected to 3 other carbon atoms - just like in graphite.
:-) Fullerenes are just a way of getting them to think about carbon again. ;-)
It's more to do with the angles those bonds are forced to take on by the structure. Having the other elements within the cage will allow different angles to occur.
Also, I think it's more likely that the chemists involved are inorganic.