The Change Mariner

Nanotechnology Gets Big

Technology News:

Near the end of six hours of interviews the other day in Houston, Smalley, a founder of Carbon Nanotechnologies and a professor at Rice University, stood before a display screen outlining potential uses of a branch of science he helped to invent. That science might, he said softly, help to solve the world's energy problems, among many other possibilities. He's working on learning to build electrical cables so efficient, for instance, that they "would easily be the replacement for every high-voltage cable in the world."

People pay attention to Smalley, one of the prodigious brains of American science. He won the Nobel in 1996, along with two collaborators, for discovering a new form of carbon, difficult to make but intoxicating in its properties. In that first discovery, in the 1980s, atoms of carbon, which can form exceedingly tight bonds with one another, were linked together into structures unknown to science, forming tiny, incredibly strong balls.

The carbon balls were shaped like the famous geodesic dome of R. Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect and scientist. Researchers named the new form of carbon buckminsterfullerene, and the balls were quickly dubbed buckyballs.