I’m a molecular biologist trapped in the body of someone with a physics degree. I’m a member of a bacteriology lab trapped in a college of “Nanoscale Science and Engineering”. As such, while I try to do cool nanoscale things with biological materials, I’m surrounded by physicists and electrical engineers along with their research projects and problems.

Don’t get me wrong, it is often very interesting and downright “cool stuff”. For now I’ll skip hot electrons and ballistic transport, or density functional theory calculations and focus on some buzz words you might have heard:

• Carbon nanotubes (CNTs)
• Graphene
• Buckyballs

In a word, they’re called fullerenes. These materials are made of one thing: carbon. Just carbon, and nothing but carbon. Why are different formulations of carbon so exciting and worth spending millions if not billions of dollars on? As with just about anything in nanotechnology, matter behaves differently at the nanoscale. Graphite (in pencils) is pretty boring. Diamonds, while pretty (and apparently friendly to women) are pretty inert and solid. The carbon allotropes have little to do with their nanoscale cousins, although that’s not to say we can’t turn on into the other.



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