Google doodle sheds light on Buckyball

Mountain View, Sep 4: Google's ultra popular doodles are back in the news again as the search engine giant is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the buckyball on Saturday, Sep 4.

Google's latest doodle features interactive buckyball in place of the yellow second 'o' in Google. The spinning buckyball can be brought to life by the movement of the mouse.

With the doodle, Google has effectively managed to plague several minds as to what exactly a buckyball is, thus shedding light on the landmark discovery by sending millions of netizens searching for information on it.

A buckyball is a spherical fullerene, which is a molecular compound made up entirely of carbon [C60].

The buckyball, which is actually called buckminsterfullerene, was discovered on Sep 4, 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O"Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

The name buckminsterfullerene comes from Richard Buckminster 'Bucky' Fuller, who was an architect and designer, whose geodesic domes and spheres the buckyball resembles. Besides this, 'fullerine' also stands for a molecule made entirely of carbon.

Buckminsterfullerene, the first of the ball-shaped family of particles, came to be known as Buckyball due to the unusual spherical arrangement of the molecule.

This unique particle family is studied and applied in several fields of sciences including electronics and nanotechnology.

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