*football here refers to international football (aka soccer) and NOT American football. ;o)

Buckminsterfullerene is a type of FULLERENE with the formula C60. A fullerene is an ALLOTROPE of carbon whose molecule consists of carbon atoms connected by single and double bonds so as to form a closed or partially closed mesh - the Buckminsterfullerene was the FIRST one discovered. The cage-like structure is made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons... Think soccer ball skeleton. ;o)

The discoverers of this CARBON allotrope named the newfound molecule after Buckminster Fuller, who designed many geodesic dome structures that look similar to C60. Geometrically speaking, the buckminsterfullerene is a naturally-occurring example of a Goldberg polyhedron which in its most commonly recognized form is an international FOOTBALL or American soccer ball. A shortened, quite recognizable name for a buckminsterfullerene is BUCKYBALL. The Buckyball is the most common naturally-occurring fullerene and manifests as fine, black powder. It is a component of SOOT.

For their ground-breaking discovery (FIRST DOCUMENTED IN 1985) and subsequent work with the Buckminsterfullerene, Robert Curl, Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene [for my fellow nerds out there - lol!]

Image from Google Images.

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