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."

I feel so dump

[pembo13]

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

My understanding...

[Toba82]

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.

Re:Nice...

[fozzy1015]

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?

nano tubes

[Blighten]

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.

Re:Do not click that link at the end!

[goaty_the_flying_sho]

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

How stable is this?

[pimpimpim]

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?

Re:My understanding...

[ChemGrrl]

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.