FOR the first time, a carbon buckyball has been ripped open, stuffed with a foreign molecule and then stitched up again.
This ability to lock up atoms or molecules, developed by Koichi Komatsu and his team from Kyoto University in Japan, could lead to buckyballs being used in a host of new ways. For example, they could form protective containers for the toxic metals that are administered to patients during medical imaging.
Until now, getting atoms inside the football-shaped 60-carbon molecules has proved difficult. The atoms of a small number of metals can be trapped in buckyball cages as they…
