A bit of hellraisin’ on a Friday night don’t do nobody no harm so it’s no surprise to see them chemists going at it hammer ‘n tong. Makes ’em seem almost human.<\/p>\n
The barney is over the shape of a molecule (might have guessed, right?).<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Nevill “Eye Test” Szwacki at Rice University in Texas dreamt up a new kinda buckyball made outta boron atoms rather than carbon. Szwacki reckons B-80 looks just like the carbon footballs y’all familiar with, ‘cept they have an extra atom at the centre of each hexagonal face.<\/p>\n
Now Arnout “White coat” Ceulemans at the University of Leuven in Belgium has studied the structure using quantum chemical calculations and says that it ain’t football-shaped after all. Instead the ball is puckered, as if somebody let the air out.<\/p>\n
Nobody has actually made B-80 and it might be a while before the matter is settled: after carbon footballs were first dreamt up, it took 20 years for somebody to actually synthesize one.<\/p>\n