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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...

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of electrically-charged molecules in space shaped like soccer balls, shedding light on the mysterious contents of the interstellar medium (ISM) - the gas and dust that fills interstellar space. The molecules … are a form of carbon called "Buckminsterfullerene," also known as "Buckyballs," which consists of 60 carbon atoms (C60) arranged in a hollow sphere. C60 has been found in some rare cases on Earth in rocks and minerals, and can also turn up in high-temperature combustion soot. C60 has been seen in space before. However, this is the first...

ocked away in a storage room on a Mosul college campus were two caches of cobalt-60, a metallic substance with lethally high levels of radiation. When contained within the heavy shielding of a radiotherapy machine, cobalt-60 is used to kill cancer cells. In terrorists' hands, it is the core ingredient of a "dirty bomb," a weapon that could be used to spread radiation and panic. Western intelligence agencies were aware of the cobalt and watched anxiously for three years for signs that the militants might try to use it. Those concerns intensified in late 2014 when Islamic State officials boasted...

Working with a material 10 times lighter than steel—but 250 times stronger—would be a dream come true for any engineer. If this material also had amazing properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity, it would start to sound like something out of a science fiction novel. Yet one Florida State University research group, the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FAC2T), is working to develop real-world applications for just such a material. Dr. Ben Wang, a professor of industrial engineering at the Florida A&M University-FSU College of Engineering, serves as director of FAC2T (www.fac2t.eng.fsu.edu), which works to...

Nobel winner who discovered 'buckyballs' dead at 62 Fri Oct 28, 8:17 PM ET HOUSTON (Reuters) - Rice University professor Richard Smalley, who shared a 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of "buckyballs," has died of cancer at the age of 62, the university said on Friday. Buckyballs, short for buckminsterfullerenes, were a form of carbon that had 60 atoms arranged in a hollow sphere and whose discovery in 1985 opened the way for the development of the field of nanotechnology. Smalley, fellow Rice chemist Robert Curl and British chemist Harold Kroto shared the prize for their work...