something interesting to hear...

As I was going through google..i realised something was difeerent..there was a ball sort of thing representing the letter O there...i clicked it...it happens to a buckyball...the explanation goes as below!!...got it from wikipedia... I know it is BORING...but surely it is interesting for all chemistry students!!...:)

A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings.

The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family's namesake, was buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀), prepared in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University. The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whosegeodesic domes it resembles. Fullerenes have since been found to occur (if rarely) in nature.^[1]

The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. Buckyballs and buckytubes have been the subject of intense research, both for their unique chemistry and for their technological applications, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.