Buckyballs

Buckyballs are bouncing around the volleyball court these days. Volleyballene is the first buckyball to be spiked with scandium atoms.

Discovered in 1985, the original buckyball was a hollow, stable sphere of 60 carbon atoms. It takes high temperatures and pressures without complaint and helped earn its creators a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996.

Volleyballene has 60 carbon atoms moulded into pentagons, plus 20 scandium atoms locked in octagons, an arrangement that resembles the panels of a volleyball.

Jing Wang at Hebei Normal University in China and colleagues tested five other configurations to see if a different mash-up proved easier to make, stronger, or more stable. Only volleyballene held its shape up to 727 °C, or 1000 kelvin.

Source: New Scientist 

Damien's note:  A fullerene is a molecule of carbon in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, and many other shapes. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and they resemble the balls used in soccer. 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.

Buckyballs is also the name given to sets of spherical magnets that can be shaped in just about any way. They have come under fire as a health hazard for children who swallow them.