Google doodles buckyball

New Google doodle to celebrate 25 years of discovery

Google doodles buckyball

4 September 2010 11:58 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Buckyball - the discovery of Buckminster-Fullerene molecule - as an interactive Google Doodle.

Visitors to Google.com and Google.co.uk will see the second "o" as a small moving ball before turning into a buckyball when you move your mouse over it.

Users can then spin the newly formed molecule to their hearts content. Clicking on the logo takes you to a search for "buckyball"

A fullerene is "any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube".

"Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes", according to Wikipedia.

"Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings".

Google regularly celebrates scientists within its Google doodles, having featured the discovery of DNA, Albert Einstein's birthday and others in the past.

- Google Doodles that are out of this world
Full tags
Online, Google, Google doodles

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