The CBC reports that scientists using the new Spitzer Space Telescope (you know, the one that is capable of nailing three hookers a day) have discovered naturally-occurring fullerenes in the dust of planetary nebulae. They theorize that the buckyballs may be responsible for light absorption in space, and that the particles may be very common in space, whereas here on Earth fullerenes are the product of laboratories.
Science geeks all over the web are talking about the story on New Scientist.com about atomic force photography. Researchers at IBM have taken the first ever photos of an object at its molecular level. The image above shows an organic compound called pentacene and its five benzene rings (ugh, I just had a painful flashback to the organic chemistry section from high school).
Pentacene is pretty cool in and of itself; it’s used along with our old friend buckminsterfullerene (“Buckyballs”) to make organic photovoltaic devices, and turns up in things like the ultra-thin plastic OLED video display Sony showed off at CES this year. (link goes to YouTube video). But that’s another topic entirely.
Being able to photograph molecules and atoms at the level of resolution IBM has achieved will someday pay off in terms of being able to arrange individual molecules into microscopic computing devices that could make almost any object “smart”.
I can’t find the post right now, but some time ago I know I had a link to an article about some scientists who had formed a sheet of material made from nanothreads made up of billions and billions of buckyballs. They ended up with a single sheet that was as strong as steel but ten times thinner than paper.
Today, this blog post at Discover magazine says that researchers think they will be able to produce a sheet of what they now call “buckypaper” that will rival the strongest composite materials in production and do it before the end of this year. They think they can have a commercially-usable version of buckypaper developed sometime in 2009 that would be suitable for military applications such as lighter armor or some aviation uses; dreams of building cars, airplanes or even space vehicles out of buckypaper are a bit farther down the road but could happen in less than a decade.
One of the highlights of our Montreal vacation trip a couple of weekends ago was visiting the Biosphere. Okay, to be totally honest about it, the actual science exhibit part of the Biosphere is a bit on the lackluster side. Not for lack of trying, but because every exhibit was something we’d seen somewhere else. The reason I liked it was because it was an opportunity to get up close and personal with the giant geodesic dome that has been a fixture of the Montreal skyline since the 1967 World’s Fair. The dome was the centerpiece of the U.S. Pavilion during Expo 67 and became the iconic symbol of the fair. Over the years, though, the dome was simply left abandoned and its exterior covering eventually had to be taken off, leaving just the steel gridwork and the building inside. In the early 1990, the Canadian government rehabbed the building and Biosphere was born, but the dome was left open to the air, which is how it remains today.
The dome was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was a philosopher, dreamer, visionary, designer, and sometimes hare-brained schemer who spent his life dedicated to the notion that life could be better for everyone if everyone embraced change and technology. In addition to designing the geodesic dome, he also designed the famed Dymaxion House, which was his vision of the “house of the future” (a very opposite vision of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” house design of the same period), the Dymaxion Car, and designs for vast floating megacities.
Later, after his death, materials scientists would honor him by naming the nanostructure of a particular carbon molecule buckminterfullerene because its shaped resembled the geodesic dome. The entire family of these carbon molecules is now called “fullerenes”. And buckminsterfullerene is more popularly known as “Bucky Balls”. Many of the advances of nanotechnology have been made possible through the applied usage of bucky balls. Fuller’s principle of “tensegrity” (the force of objects pushing and pulling at each other simultaneously), which makes the geodesic dome possible, is also used in other applications, such as this new prosthetic foot design.
This week’s New Yorker has a feature story by Elizabeth Kolbert entitled “Dymaxion Man” about Fuller, his work and ideas, and a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City about Fuller that opens this week and runs until mid-September. I’m hoping that maybe Bridget and I can get down to New York in August while Charlotte is at her grandparents’ house to see this exhibit.
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