Free Republic

h/t to Red Badger Recently, a team of researchers from the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), South Korea led by Director Rodney Ruoff and his colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China led by Professor Yanwu Zhu, reported a discovery of a new form of carbon. Zhu who led the USCT team said, “Professor Ruoff explained his interest in the triply periodic minimal surfaces that were described by the mathematician Schwartz, and how trivalently bonded carbon can in principle yield identical structures at the mathematical constructs. These are now referred...

Synthetic carbon allotropes are intriguing due to their exceptional properties and potential applications. Scientists have devoted decades to synthesizing new types of carbon materials. However, a two-dimensional fullerene, which possesses a unique structure, has not been successfully synthesized until now. Recently, scientists developed a new interlayer bonding cleavage strategy to prepare a two-dimensional monolayer polymeric fullerene. The research group was led by Prof. ZHENG Jian from the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS) The researchers prepared magnesium intercalated C60 bulk crystals as the precursor to the exfoliation reaction. They then utilized a ligand-assisted cation exchange strategy...

Can you give us a sneak preview of your Pittcon plenary lecture ‘Exameter objects to nanometer ones and back again’?What I want to emphasise in this lecture is that the discovery of C60 started off from an interest in massive clouds of gas in interstellar space – some of them are 100 light years across. The chemistry in those clouds is quite fascinating and, in some parts of them, you find carbon is rather abundant. I thought that this carbon was coming out of stars and my interest led to the experiments that uncovered C60. That prompted conjectures about whether...

Flexible display screens and cheap solar cells can become a reality through research and development in organic electronics. Physicists at Umeå University in northern Sweden have developed a simple method for producing cheap electronic components, writes Cellular-News.

Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who helped discover buckyballs, the soccer ball-shaped form of carbon, and championed the field of nanotechnology, has died at the age of 62. Smalley, who had battled cancer, died Friday at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University said. "We will miss Rick's brilliance, commitment, energy, enthusiasm and humanity," Rice President David Leebron said. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with fellow Rice chemist Robert Curl and British chemist Sir Harold Kroto for the discovery of the new form of carbon, which they dubbed buckminsterfullerene — buckyballs for short — because...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 January 19 Fullerenes as Miniature Cosmic Time Capsules Credit & Copyright: Keith Beardmore (LANL) Explanation: Scientists have found, unexpectedly, tiny time capsules from billions of years in the past. The discovery involves small molecules that can apparently become trapped during the formation of large enclosed molecules known as fullerenes, or buckyballs. Luann Becker (UCSB) and collaborators recently found fullerenes in an ancient meteorite that fell to Earth...