American scientist Robert F. Curl, Jr., a professor of physical chemistry at Rice University, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with fellow Rice professor Richard E. Smalley and Briton Harold W. Kroto from the University of Sussex, for the discovery of a new form of the element carbon, called Carbon 60. The third molecular form of carbon (the other two forms are diamonds and graphite), C60 consists of 60 atoms of carbon arranged in hexagons and pentagons and is called a "buckminsterfullerene," "fullerene," or by its nickname "Buckyball" in honor of Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles.

Fullerenes, which consist of 60 atoms of carbon arranged in hexagons and pentagons in a structure resembling a soccer ball, have practical applications. Extraordinarily stable and resistant to radiation and chemical destruction, fullerenes promise to be the basis for remarkably strong but lightweight materials, new drug delivery systems, computer semiconductors, solar cells...