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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."

26 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 b0r1s · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    2. 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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    3. Re:Wha? by smittyoneeach · · Score: 3, Funny

      OMG, what a nightmarish thought! A second Potomac Puzzle Palace, adjacent the first?
      That much bureaucratic inertia could slow Earth's rotation and really tear up the weather.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  2. Do not click that link at the end! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Do not click that link at the end! by goaty_the_flying_sho · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Weird, timothy didn't post the story for him this time.

  3. SimCity 2000 by thisnow1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. I feel so dump by pembo13 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What field of science do I have study for how long to understand that summary?

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  5. 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.

    1. Re:Nice... by fozzy1015 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      More interested about their experiements to put certain metals in buckyeyes for medical scanning. So is the idea of putting radioactive metals in fullerenes to 'insulate' what would normally be dangerous metals in the body?

    2. Re:Nice... by Hockney+Twang · · Score: 2, Informative
      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.
      // ==UserScript==
      // @name Slashdot Script
      // @namespace None
      // @description None
      // @include http://.slashdot.org/*
      // @include http://slashdot.org/*
      // ==/UserScript==
       
      if(styles=document.getElementsB yTagName('link'))
        for(i=0;i<styles.length;i++){
            attribs=styles[i].getAttribute('href');
            if(attribs.search("slashdot_")>-1)
                styles[i].parentNode.removeChild(styles[i]);
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      linkArray = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
      if(linkArray)
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                  targetParent.removeChild(targetNode.nextSibling.ne xtSibling);
                  targetParent.removeChild(targetNode.nextSibling);
                    targetParent.removeChild(targetNode);
                  }
              }
  6. Am I the only who chuckled... by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 4, Funny

    .... when coming across the name of the scientist - Mrs Beavers? The jokes are endless. :)

    --
    Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
  7. My understanding... by Toba82 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:My understanding... by zrobotics · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:My understanding... by IainMH · · Score: 4, Funny

      Just because you don't understand it, it doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

    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. ;-)

    4. Re:My understanding... by ChemGrrl · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hi All, This is Christine Beavers... ya know the Mrs. Beavers. The molecule is overall uncharged. The terbuim atoms each carry a 3+, the nitride is a -3, and the fullerene cage itself carries a 6-. I don't endorse the blog, because it does misstate some things, and it is an opinion at the end. Not to mention the copyright infringement of stealing the JACS image, not the one I gave to UCD news.... hmmm I feel compromised... well I sure didn't ask him to write about my paper.

  8. If you add another terbium atom by thewils · · Score: 4, Funny

    You could give it to the Kiwis to play with ;)

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  9. Munchies by yellekc · · Score: 3, Funny

    Anyone one else hungry for the worlds smallest omelet?

  10. Finally! by ZSpade · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  11. nano tubes by Blighten · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  12. Can't wait for the bucky chicken! by Deflatamouse! · · Score: 4, Funny

    But this time we know the egg definitely came first!

  13. Direct link to story by Yetihehe · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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  14. Re:Am I one of the few that at least sorta underst by bladesjester · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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  15. How stable is this? by pimpimpim · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    --
    molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
  16. Let's review the letter "S" by boyfaceddog · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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.

    --
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