A clue to how this might be done came with the discovery of a fourth carbon structure, one that was found in the most unlikely of places: the flame of a candle. In 1985 Professor Harry Kroto and his team discovered that inside a candle flame carbon atoms were miraculously self-assembling in groups of exactly sixty atoms to form super-molecules of carbon. The molecules looked like giant footballs and were nicknamed “buckyballs” after the architect Buckminster Fuller, who had designed geodesic domes with the same hexagonal structure. Kroto’s team received the 1996 Nobel Prize for chemistry for
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