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A Buckyegg Breaks Pentagon Rules

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gotta-break-some-eggs-to-well-you-know dept.

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."

4 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Wha? by Lord_Dweomer · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Most confusing /. story blurb evar.

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    1. Re:Wha? by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Indeed, neat story, terrible Slashdot writeup. If they had said: A Buckyegg Breaks the "Adjacent Pentagon Rule", it would have been much less confusing.

      And I couldn't figure out what the heck world cup soccer had to do with buckyballs until I read the fine article, either.

      Sometimes, I think the editors post these things just to make people so thoroughly confused that they'll click the article. Makes me wonder if they get a kickback from ads on the article page or something. :-D

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  2. Nice... by MustardMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:My understanding... by IainMH · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    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. :-) Fullerenes are just a way of getting them to think about carbon again. ;-)