Keep Your Eye On The 'Bucky Balls'

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By Newsweek Editors

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The iconoclastic architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller never realized his dream of making the geodesic dome as popular a building shape as the box, but if man didn't appreciate the beauty of his design, nature did. In 1985, researchers led by chemist Richard Smalley of Rice University serendipitously discovered a strange molecule, made of 60 atoms of carbon, shaped exactly like a geodesic dome. They dubbed it buckminsterfullerene--or "bucky ball" to its fans. It is only the third form of pure carbon known (the other two are graphite and diamond) and has properties that are fantastic even by Fuller's standards. These "truncated icosahedrons" do not react with even corrosive gases, suggesting that they could serve as the slipperiest lubricants ever devised. They can be blasted apart only by powerful lasers, and they spin more than 1 billion times per second-and so might become "the smallest ball bearing ever," says Smalley.

That's only the beginning of bucky ball's talents. Last week, in the journal Nature, researchers led by Arthur Hebard of AT&T Bell Labs reported that when bucky balls are spiked with potassium, they carry electricity with no resistance, even at temperatures above where most such "superconductors" work. Although applications are years away, finding a superconductor with the composition and structure of the bucky ball is "remarkable and unanticipated," says Arthur Sleight, a leading superconductivity researcher at Oregon State University, It thus promises to rekindle interest in high-temperature superconductors, which has cooled since their red-hot debut in 1987.

The discovery should also spark interest in the electric properties of these molecules. Bucky balls absorb and release electrons without suffering any damage. They are thus a good candidate for storing power; compared with heavy, inefficient lead-acid batteries, the kind in today's cars, they are light and nearly inexhaustible. Bucky Fuller would be proud.

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