'Buckyball' molecular structures aren't confined to carbon. Uranium fullerenes that contain various numbers of uranium atoms have now joined the club, thanks to Peter Burns and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Fullerene U60 (pictured, top) looks just like its carbon analogue, whereas U44 (bottom) is peanut-shaped, comprising 12 hexagons and 12 pentagons. Fullerenes usually have as few adjacent pentagons as possible, but the peanut bucks this trend. This is because the peanut shape has higher symmetry, which the uranyl clusters prefer over minimizing pentagon neighbours, the authors say.
Uranium fullerenes are stable in solution for several months and easy to make by a self-assembly process in water — in contrast to carbon fullerenes, which have to be zapped into being with a huge current.
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Chemistry: Buckyball expansion. Nature 458, 262 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/458262c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/458262c
