What are the possible applications of Buckyball?
Although practical applications for buckyball have not yet been realized (Figure ??–newspaper headline “Buckyballs apps slow to develop”), promising groundwork has been laid in two areas. In one area, materials called buckytubes have been made in much the same way as buckyball is made. Buckytubes typically consist of 2 to 50 concentric tubes, and each tube is an array of carbon atoms linked together in a curved sheet. The ends of each set of concentric tubes fit together like Russian nesting dolls and consist of hemispherical arrays of carbon atoms similar to the spherical arrays of atoms found in buckyball. Shaped like needles, each buckytube is about one micron long (one micron is about 1/70 of a human hair). If buckytubes can be lengthened into fibers, they will likely be far stronger than ordinary reinforcing fibers. In another area of work with buckyball, a derivative of C60 was shown to inhibit HIV-1 and HIV-2, the human immunodeficiency viruses that cause AIDS. Researchers at t
