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Chemists Build First "Buckyball" Made of Boron
CelestialScience writes Researchers have built the first "buckyballs" composed entirely of boron. Unlike the original, carbon-based buckyballs, the boron molecules are not shaped like soccer balls, with tessellating pentagons and hexagons. Instead, they are molecular cages made up of hexagons, heptagons and triangles. As Lai-Sheng Wang of Brown University and colleagues report in the journal Nature Chemistry, each one contains 40 atoms, compared with carbon buckyballs which are made of 60. Boron is not the first element after carbon to get "buckyballed", but the boron balls may be the closest analogue to the carbon variety. Because of their reactivity, they could be useful for storing hydrogen.
The first time I read the headline I thought it said Chemists Build First "Buckyball" Made of Bacon .
Boron's OK, I suppose, but bacon would have been way wicked cooler.
They're still talking about his balls 40 years after his death.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is some cool shit. The carbon buckyballs spurred development and interest in carbon nanotubes and some other nano-material stuff. I hope this provides some more funding and interest.
Was it made of molten boron?
Nobody doesn't like molten boron.
Move Sig. For great justice.
It occurs to me that it was you who recognized the potential for a pun, but you were unable to actually come up with one. Very sad, pathetic, actually. Something tells me your third sentence should have had a period after 'thinking.'
Any chemists out there? Will it make a nice fuel when the hydrogen is attached? Like this one:
http://aviationtrivia.blogspot...
Would it be dangerous like this dude here says (read the tendencies part):
http://www.dequasiebooks.com/g...
I also read that these fuels were also researched in USSR. It always makes me wonder what didn't happen there. I know a couple of nice stories myself about the things that didn't happen. Things only happened when they were good or meant to be terrifying or when their fallout set off the alarms in Swedish nuclear plant. I did read these bits about boron based fuels when there was some article about green UFO-s. I know these sources might not be adecuate or true, so you might want to add your own.
Maybe the world would be better if instead of assuming what others will say, you would wait and listen. When YOU assume how others will respond, it is impossible that the response would be intelligent, but that has nothing to do with others.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Monks have known about this for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Why? The way he did it means that others of his ilk will be able to use his post as a source that Republicans actually did it. His side tend to work that way quite often.
So the fifth element isn't Milla Jovovich?
Since I think the goal is to try to see if there exists potential for dense hydrogen storage with these molecules, not necessarily using them directly as a fuel, suach as the borane experiments. Still, the borohydrides are not know to be such nice chemicals to play around with either, they are quite toxic, corrosive, and highly flammable, and require proper protective gear and procedures to be handled without harming yourself.
Stuffing this around a nuke will create all sorts of explosive evil, since it will compress the core from the boron exploding due to neutrons from the fission stage overloading the boron. See Friedwardt Winterberg's paper
http://vixra.org/pdf/1106.0009v1.pdf
Increasing the boron content has the potential to substantially reduce the size of the device.