The fullerenes, discovered in 1985 by researchers at Rice University, are a family of carbon allotropes named after Buckminster Fuller.

They are molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube.

Spherical fullerenes are sometimes called buckyballs, the C60 variant is often compared to a typical white and black soccer football.

Cylindrical fullerenes are called buckytubes.

Recently discovered is the "buckyegg", by researchers at UC Davis.

Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of a sheet of linked hexagonal rings, but they contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings that prevent the sheet from being planar..

For more information about the topic Fullerene, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

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Related Stories

Improbable 'Buckyegg' Hatched (September 29, 2006) — An egg-shaped fullerene, or "buckyball egg" has been made and characterized by chemists at UC Davis, Virginia Tech and Emory and Henry College, Virginia. The unexpected discovery opens new ...  > read more

New Form Of Pure Carbon Found In Mexican Meteorite Possible Player In Origin Of Life (July 15, 1999) — A University of Hawaii researcher and her colleagues from NASA's Space Science Division have confirmed that a new form of carbon previously made in the laboratory also exists in nature. The ...  > read more

Experiments, Simulations Reveal Birth Secret Of Buckyballs (October 30, 2007) — The birth secret of buckyballs -- hollow spheres of carbon no wider than a strand of DNA -- has been caught on tape. An electron microscope video and computer simulations show that "shrink-wrapping" ...  > read more

Synthesis With A Template (May 1, 2009) — Researchers have synthesized the first example of an inorganic, carbon-free fullerene ...  > read more

Structure Of A New Family Of Buckyballs Has Fused Pentagons (December 6, 2000) — Virginia Tech chemists and colleagues at several institutions will report in the November 23, 2000 of Nature that they have created a family of fullerene molecules that break the sacrosanct ...  > read more

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