DailyDirt: Allotropes Of Carbon
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Most people are familiar with graphite and diamonds, but elemental carbon comes in plenty of other forms. Buckyballs weren’t discovered until 1985, but since then, all kinds of fullerene structures and carbon nanotubes have been made. And maybe we haven’t found all the different kinds of carbon yet. Here are just a few links on some of them.
- Carbon nanofoam can exhibit magnetic properties temporarily. This form of carbon is a spongy solid, and it was first made in a lab in 2004 using pulsed lasers that create a web of carbon tubes at temperatures exceeding 10,000°C. [url]
- A linear form of carbon (called carbyne or linear acetylenic carbon) could be strangely strong, exotic material. However, it’s not easy to come by carbyne chains that are more than a few dozen atoms long (so far). [url]
- There’s a patented process for making chaoite — the naturally-occurring mineral form of carbon found near meteorite impacts. The exact structure of chaoite is not well known, but the patent office still granted a patent for making the stuff. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: allotrope, buckyball, carbon, carbyne, chaoite, chemistry, diamond, fullerenes, linear acetylenic carbon, materials, nanofoam, science
Comments on “DailyDirt: Allotropes Of Carbon”
all these carbon based new thingys
graphene and now carbon nanofoam….
Only if we can extract all the global warming carbon based gases to make these new shiny thingys… instead of digging them up using more carbon based petrochemicals…
Interesting that someone can claim a patent for a ‘naturally occurring’ form of carbon (chaoite). Perhaps it is only natural in the sense that it is made on earth as a result of the energy impact of a meteorite?
Re: Re:
My understanding from the summary is that the patent is not on the form of carbon itself, but on a particular process for making it. The former would be unreasonable, but if sufficiently narrow and non-obvious, the latter can be entirely fine.