Google Doodle, Google, Celebrate 25th Anniversary of the Buckyball

by the Left Coast Rebel

Does anyone here know what a buckyball is? Because I sure don't but Google today thought the 25th anniversary of the buckyball was cause for a Google-Doodle celebration. Wikipedia has this on the buckyball:

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.

Ah, yes, excuse me while my eyes glaze over. Silly me, I though the buckyball was some sort of Rubix Cube.

Leave it to the whiz-nerds at Google to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a spherical fullerne - a.k.a. buckyball.

Where's my Rubix Cube?

Damn, I left it in 1985 somewhere.....

Updated: UK's Guardian has more on the buckyball:

The buckyball was first discovered 25 years ago by a group of scientists at Rice University, in Texas, and named after the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, noted for popularising the geodesic dome.

To mark the discovery of this specially shaped molecule composed entirely of carbon on 4 September 1985, Google has changed the second O in its logo to a manipulatable version of a buckyball for the day.

Buckyball is the colloquial name used to describe a spherical fullerene – an abbreviation of buckminsterfullerene, its full name.

There are a variety of different buckyballs depending on the structure – the most recognisable, and first discovered, is the Buckminsterfullerene C60. It shares the geodesic structure of a panelled football and is the smallest fullerene molecule in which no two pentagons share an edge – giving it structural strength.

The C60 is found in soot, though rarely occurs in nature. Other allotropes of carbon include diamond and graphite but the discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded this.

The unusual spherical arrangement of the molecule led to the nickname buckyball. Scientists have since discovered buckytubes, nanotubes, megatubes and nano onions.

The unique chemistry of the family of particles has been widely researched for use in electronics, nanotechnology and many other fields of science.

Cross posted to LCR.