{"id":225116,"date":"2025-11-14T20:13:39","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T02:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/science-history-chemists-discover-buckyballs-the-most-perfect-molecules-in-existence-nov-14-1985"},"modified":"2025-11-14T20:13:39","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T02:13:39","slug":"science-history-chemists-discover-buckyballs-the-most-perfect-molecules-in-existence-nov-14-1985","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/science-history-chemists-discover-buckyballs-the-most-perfect-molecules-in-existence-nov-14-1985","title":{"rendered":"Science history: Chemists discover buckyballs \u2014 the most perfect molecules in existence \u2014 Nov. 14, 1985"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/science-history-chemists-discover-buckyballs-the-most-perfect-molecules-in-existence-nov-14-1985.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Over a feverish 10-day period in 1985, scientists conceived of a new molecule of perfect symmetry \u2014 and named it after one of the 20th century\u2019s most famous inventors and futurists.<\/p>\n<p>The hunt started in the 1970s when Harry Kroto, a lab chemist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., was puzzling over the discovery of a primordial soup of organic molecules in the \u201cvast dark clouds that lie between the stars,\u201d Kroto said in his <a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/tag\/nobel-prize\" data-auto-tag-linker=\"true\" data-mrf-recirculation=\"inline-link\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/tag\/nobel-prize\" data-mrf-link=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/tag\/nobel-prize\" cmp-ltrk=\"inline-link\" cmp-ltrk-idx=\"0\" mrfobservableid=\"f9482084-4b0b-4bf6-964e-fedf3fe6e7c8\" data-hawk-tracked=\"hawklinks\">Nobel Prize<\/a> speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over a feverish 10-day period in 1985, scientists conceived of a new molecule of perfect symmetry \u2014 and named it after one of the 20th century\u2019s most famous inventors and futurists. The hunt started in the 1970s when Harry Kroto, a lab chemist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., was puzzling over the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}