What's the Difference Between a Buckyball and a BMC?

We've all seen geodesic domes that were intelligently designed by humans. The inventor, the great designer Buckminster Fuller, might have been quite surprised to learn that nature got there first. Two years after his death in 1983, a new form of carbon was discovered: C60, a geodesic-dome shaped molecule that was named buckminsterfullerene in his honor. Since then, numerous other "fullerenes" have been discovered, comprising shapes of spheres, ellipsoids, and rods. The carbon nanotubes we he...