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.

Comments

Re:This is cool shit

[Dynedain]

Of course, we still can't make anything out of carbon nanotubes.

Wikipedia claims to differ with several thousand tons produced and used annually.

Re:This is cool shit

[Anonymous Coward]

lol - fail much?

Of course we can make all kinds of things from carbon nanotubes.

From heatsinks
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175457-this-carbon-nanotube-heatsink-is-six-times-more-thermally-conductive-could-trigger-a-revolution-in-cpu-clock-speeds

Darkest black paint
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/blackest-is-the-new-black-scientists-have-developed-a-material-so-dark-that-you-cant-see-it-9602504.html

radios
http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/projects/nanoradio/radio.html

transistors
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/528601/ibm-commercial-nanotube-transistors-are-coming-soon/

  I for one want the surface of my vehicle coated in the new carbon nanotube black coating so that laser speed sensors would fail entirely.

So, really, we can't making "ANYTHING" from these eh??? Wrong. We just can't create them on a commercial scale *yet*.

Re:This is cool shit

[MightyYar]

The really, really black stuff from yesterday is made with nanotubes.