HOUSTON, Texas, Oct. 31



Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, co-discoverer of the buckyball and widely considered to be one of the fathers of nanotechnology, died Friday at the age of 62 after a long battle with cancer.

Rice University professor Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with fellow Rice chemist Robert Curl and British chemist Sir Harold Kroto for the 1985 discovery of a new form of carbon nicknamed buckyballs. Shaped like soccerballs and no wider than a strand of DNA, buckyballs each contain 60 carbon atoms arranged in a hollow sphere resembling two conjoined geodesic domes. Smalley coined the name "buckminsterfullerene" for the discovery in honor of architect and geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller.

» Read the entire article