On October 9, 1996, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Robert F. Curl Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, both of Rice University in Houston, Texas and Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex in England, for their collaborative discovery of a third form of carbon, the buckminsterfullerene.
The most common "fullerene," or "buckyball," is composed of 60 carbon atoms bound in a soccer ball shape arranged in 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. These findings in 1985 have spurred a search for new substances, polymers, catalysts, and drug-delivery systems. The discovery has prompted novel insights into superconducting materials and the origins of the universe.
The buckyball has also become the first official molecule of a Worldcon (and you thought ethanol was Bucconeer's official molecule). The buckminsterfullerene was named in honor of R. Buckminster Fuller, designer of the similarly contoured geodesic dome. We have adopted the buckyball as a symbol of the near-future technology we wish to showcase at Bucconeer.
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