buckyballs

On my commute to work today, I had the misfortune of being crammed into a narrow tube underground. But it could have been worse: I could’ve been squished into a single dimension. Alex Winter on His Character in Destroy All Neighbors That’s what recently happened to some krypton atoms in an Ulm University chemistry lab. Using transmission electron microscopy (or TEM), a team managed to squeeze the noble gas into a nanotube with a diameter 1/500,000th that of a human hair. In such a confined space, the atoms could not…

Scientists may have just tracked down the source of some mysterious infrared glows detected emanating from stars and clouds of interstellar dust and gas.These Unidentified Infrared Emission (UIE) bands have baffled scientists for decades; according to a theoretical new work, at least some of these bands can be produced by highly ionized buckminsterfullerene, more commonly known as buckyballs.  "I am extremely honored to have played a part in the astonishingly complex quantum chemistry investigations undertaken by Dr…