Great Golden Buckyballs!

For those of you that still harbor the grudge that science is boring and painfully complex, Seattlest would like to introduce you to the buckyball. Not only is this little sucker given a name that is impossibly irresistable, it is also potentially one of the more important scientific discoveries of the past 20 years (yielding a Nobel prize for its co-discoverers in 1985). Oh fine, back to the name: nature is apparently teeming with close cousins to the buckyball, including buckytubes, buckybabies, and fuzzyballs. Seattlest couldn't make that up if we wanted to.

Buckyballs are really, really small; each is only 6 angstroms across, or 6 millionths the diameter of a human hair. Their shape belies their namesake: Buckminster Fuller, the designer famous for his geodesic domes. Buckyballs are hollow ball-shaped molecules made from hexagonal and pentagonal arrangements of carbon atoms, and are one of 3 known forms of pure carbon, joined by diamonds and graphite. Their geodesic structure makes them extremely strong, at least 6 times sturdier than diamond.

Buckyballs (aka "fullerenes") haven't yielded significant practical applications just yet, but many believe they will be an important aspect of nanotechnology developments. According to Wikipedia:

In April 2003, fullerenes were under study for potential medicinal use: binding specific antibiotics to the structure to target resistant bacteria and even target certain cancer cells such as melanoma. The October 2005 issue of Chemistry and Biology contains an article describing the use of fullerenes as light-activated antimicrobial agents. In the field of nanotechnology, heat resistance and superconductivity are some of the more heavily studied properties.

By now, you are no doubt wondering what any of this has to do with Seattlest. Until recently, scientists thought there were only pure-carbon buckyballs, but a Washington State University scientist, Dr. Lai-Sheng Wang, has recently announced evidence of the first metallic buckyballs made entirely of gold. Said gold buckyballs were formed by a process you might expect to find in an Austin Powers movie--according to Dr. Wang, they "used a laser to vaporize gold."

Asked what one might do with gold buckyballs, Dr. Wang indicated that you can put your weed another atom in it. By dorking around with combos of various atoms inside gold buckyballs as scientists have done with their carbon predecessors, they hope to discover new materials with novel chemical properties. Giant gold buckyball viaduct, anyone? On second thought, if we rebuild the viaduct, it would have to be made entirely from dopeyballs.