What do you get when you take buckyballs, soak them in a
particular solvent and crush them under the pressure of more than 300,000
atmospheres?
Like diamonds, buckyballs (technically
buckminsterfullerenes) are made of carbon. They're a well-ordered, cage-like
structures of 60 carbon atoms that look remarkably like soccer balls. When the
scientists smashed them, they lost their cage-like structure, as expected. What
wasn't expected was what they turned into.
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