Carbon-fiber is a high-tech construction material which has been seeing a lot of use lately in tennis rackets, bicycles, and high-performance aircraft. It's already the strongest fiber known. This makes the discovery of "buckytubes" even more striking. A buckytube is carbon-fiber with a difference: it's a buckyball extruded into a long continuous cylinder comprised of one single superstrong molecule.
C70, a buckyball cousin shaped like a rugby ball, seems to be useful in producing high-tech films of artificial diamond. Then there are "fuzzyballs" with sixty strands of hydrogen hair, "bunnyballs" with twin ears of butylpyridine, flourinated "teflonballs" that may be the slipperiest molecules ever produced.
This sudden wealth of new high-tech slang indicates the potential riches of this new and multidisciplinary field of study, where physics, electronics, chemistry and materials-science are all overlapping, right now, in an exhilirating microsoccerball scrimmage.
Today there are more than fifty different teams of scientists investigating buckyballs and their relations, including industrial heavy-hitters from AT&T, IBM and Exxon. SCIENCE magazine voted buckminsterfullerene "Molecule of the Year" in 1991. Buckyball papers have also appeared in NATURE, NEW SCIENTIST, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, even FORTUNE and BUSINESS WEEK. Buckyball breakthroughs are coming well-nigh every week, while the fax machines sizzle in labs around the world. Buckyballs are strange, elegant, beautiful, very intellectually sexy, and will soon be commercially hot.
In chemical terms, the discovery of buckminsterfullerene -- a