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.
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.
Now, who’s going to discover a Bucky Chicken?
Well if they do the bucky chicken, at least we’ll know which came first.
(Do the bucky chicken -get it?)
I guess the egg did come first.
When I cook, my eggs look like carbon. Most of my cooking resembles chunks of carbon.
Well at least you try, Mr. Fusion. Remember McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Now go rip out your sink and throw it out your living room window. Ah… feel the RUSH !!
(No cheating, you’re not allowed to drag it, not even partway.)