Mitsubishi Corporation is coordinating
a multinational effort to explore and unleash the immense
potential of a remarkable material known as fullerene (Mitsubishi
Monitor, April/May 2001). Fullerene is the subject of a new
field of scientific inquiry that was born in 1985. That was
when scientists working in the United Kingdom and the United
States discovered the third form of carbon crystals, after
diamonds and graphite.
The scientists named their discovery after Buckminster
Fuller because it occurs in spherical shapes that are suggestive
of Fuller's geodesic domes. The etymology occasioned the popular
nickname, Buckyballs. And the discovery earned the 1996 Nobel
Prize in chemistry for Sir Harold W. Kroto, of the University
of Sussex in the United Kingdom, and for Dr. Robert F. Curl
Jr. and Dr. Richard E. Smalley, both of Rice University in
the United States.
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