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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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Leads to Rolands blog. He's whoring it again. Don't give him your clickthroughs.
I've been replaying SimCity 2000 lately and that reads like one of the crazy ad-libbed thrown together random newspaper articles, but not quite as coherent.
What field of science do I have study for how long to understand that summary?
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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.
.... when coming across the name of the scientist - Mrs Beavers? The jokes are endless. :)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Don't tell the Pentagon, or those science guys will be in Guantanamo!
IANAOC (I am not an organic chemist), but the way I see it, previous buckyball compounds needed to have the soccer ball shape because of the number of free electrons in the molecular bond didn't allow the adjacent pentagon structure to exist. Is it possible that the shell may not have a neutral charge? The molecule within could compensate and that might allow this 'impossible' set of bonds to work.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
You could give it to the Kiwis to play with ;)
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Anyone one else hungry for the worlds smallest omelet?
Now that the drive is well underway, how long till they finish the Heart of Gold?
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Even for Roland the Plogger, this is lame. Does he pay Slashdot to let him through, or what?
This is actually a pretty interesting break-through, given that carbon nano-tubes (the discovery of bucky balls lead to the formations of them) are somewhat limited in their capabilities to form certain angles. I'm wondering how stable these 'deformations' are in accord to the whole system... as bucky balls are very stable.
But this time we know the egg definitely came first!
Direct link to story http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=7891
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Just so you know, no I didn't RTFA. Oh ya, and I can't guarantee anybody will understand this (even the people that know what buckyballs are) since I'm by no means a chemist, physicist, etc, and therefore there is a good chance I haven't got a clue what I'm talking about... you have been warned...
Am I one of the few that at least sorta understood?
Just myself being a nerd and having one day randomly stumbled upon "Buckyballs" (Buckminsterfullerene - and this was actually before Wikipedia). If I remember right, the stuff is basically a bunch of carbon atoms arranged in hex shapes, then the edges of the hex's are stuck together and wrapped up to make a ball. Since the hex's are pretty much perfectly symetrical, the ball oughta stick together fairly evenly and make, for the most part, a perfect sphere.
This is where the article starts to mean something, because the buckyball they produced broke that perfect sphere, so I would assume either the side(s) of some of the hex's are longer than other sides on those hex's, or some of the side's are not connected at the vertices
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.
If they were such great "laws" then I guess they aren't really laws if they were broken and thus been proven wrong eh? ;) :P
I think they'd be better off calling them "hypothesis" or "theories" then since they obviously aren't "laws"...
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.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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I find it funny that this unexpected and unpredicted result came from experiments attempting to find more predictable ways of making fullerenes.
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http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=7891
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Printable version
Improbable "Buckyegg" Hatched
September 28, 2006
graphic: purple and blue balls inside an egg-shaped structure
Buckyegg (Christine Beavers/graphic)
An egg-shaped fullerene, or "buckyball egg" has been made and characterized by chemists at UC Davis, Virginia Tech and Emory and Henry College, Va. The unexpected discovery opens new possibilities for structures for fullerenes, which could have a wide range of uses.
"It was a total surprise," said Christine Beavers, a chemistry graduate student working with Professors Alan Balch and Marilyn Olmstead at UC Davis. Beavers is first author on the paper, published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Fullerenes, sometimes called "buckyballs," are usually spherical molecules of carbon, named after the futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. The carbon atoms are arranged in pentagons and hexagons, so their structures can resemble a soccer ball. An important rule -- until now -- is that no two pentagons can touch, but are always surrounded by hexagons.
The "buckyegg" compound was made by collaborating scientists at Virginia Tech, led by Professor Harry Dorn. They heated a mixture of carbon and other ingredients under special conditions to make a mixture of fullerenes, then shipped the products to UC Davis, where Balch's group worked on characterizing their structures.
When Beavers started to map out the structure, she found two pentagons next to each other, making the pointy end of the egg. Initially she thought that the results were a mistake, but she showed the data to Marilyn Olmstead, an expert on X-ray crystallography, and they decided that the results were real. The egg contains a molecule of triterbium nitride inside.
The experiment was actually part of a project to find new, more predictable ways to make fullerenes, Beavers said. The researchers were trying to make fullerenes with atoms of terbium, a metal from the lanthanide series of the periodic table, trapped inside. Metals similar to terbium are used as contrast agents for some medical scanning procedures. By putting these metals inside fullerenes, the researchers hope to make compounds that could be both medically useful and well-tolerated in the body.
The other authors on the research paper are Tianming Zuo and Kim Harich at Virginia Tech and James Duchamp at Emory and Henry College. Funding was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
It looks like there's a lot of internal energy in such a system, especially when there is something inside. Couldn't you do some neat energy tricks with this?
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http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=48 dated 11-22-00, 10:15 PM. Just Google for 'buckyballs Breaks Pentagon Rules' ... ;-]
Funny thing is that searching Google News for 'buckyballs Breaks Pentagon Rules' has the link http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=368 (Slashdotted?) mentioned in the article as its one and only result.
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TFA: The experiment was actually part of a project to find new, more predictable ways to make fullerenes
...and then this happens. Back to the drawing-board, guys!
I guess that's the nature of science, though - it's the surprises that are most interesting.
No, no... you must study Political Science.
... I'm positive from the article title that it's a story about a rogue Pentagon insider. Of course I haven't read the article or summary yet.
"A. Buckyegg Breaks Pentagon Rules"
[insert witty sig here]
I wonder why Anonymous Cowards have this fascination with sheep? Either they can't sleep or they're thinking of their girlfriends out on the farm.
..is hard to put in words.
First you have a very informative title, which got me wondering what kind of assasin/agent/geek would call himself buckyballs and annoy the Pentagon.
Then I got hit by this Jewel:
Chemists from Virginia and California have cooked a soup of fullerenes which produced an improbable buckyegg.
and I felt like a new man. There's a name for this kind of catch-phrase whoring, I just can't remember it right now.
Then I realised it wasn't over yet. submitter was just getting warmed up. Fifa, eggs (get it? balls and eggs?) and plenty more to come. All you have to do is follow the link to..you guessed it! Roland's blog!
I'm sorry, but trolling becomes mandatory in these circumstances. If we don't troll insightfully, what meaning does democracy have?
LAME
I don't want any nano molecule cages floating around in my blood stream. Cancer could only get worse with wierd stuff like this in medical use, right?
No offense to PHDs involved, but wouldn't the eggs be very useful because of their inherent lack of symmetry, similarly to how water is useful because one side is very electro-negative? Depending on the properties of the contained metal, I imagine the eggs would produce very similar effects.
I, for one, have my hands in my pockets
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
"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.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
What does this have to do with FIFA?
"I forgot my mantra."
Scientists should have to read the Necronomicon before they start tampering with this kind of stuff.
There are several versions of 'Buckyballs' that are not spheroid - due to 'bands' of atoms that configure into other shapes. Like, say, a 'belt', on a baloon - 'elongating' what began as a sphere.
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NT bwahahaha
So the question I would pose is: Is this just a scientific interest, or is a buckyball/buckyegg that doesn't following the pentagonal rules more useful (easier to produce, different/useful properties, etc) in some way than the regular variety of buckyball?