Her team also discovered how to make them lose their toxicity by clothing the Fullerenes in other chemicals.
Fullerenes are hollow tubes, spheres, or ellipsoids that are composed entirely of carbon.
FORBES: Quantum Dots and Fullerenes Team Up For Better Nanoscale Solar Panels
For the moment, Dr Dugan is more interested in using fullerenes to probe the workings of the nervous system.
Whether people will ever benefit from a brainful of fullerenes is another question.
What makes the Brookhaven research here so interesting is the use of the fullerenes in combination with the quantum dots.
FORBES: Quantum Dots and Fullerenes Team Up For Better Nanoscale Solar Panels
In the case of Fullerenes, an overzealous regulator could potentially have used the fish brain damage finding to shut down Buckyball production.
But even more recently, chemist Vicky Colvin at Rice University showed that, while Fullerenes kill human liver and skin cells, they don't damage DNA and are non-carcinogenic.
Such helium was found inside fullerenes in well-studied, clay sediments that contain extraterrestrial iridium and highly shocked minerals resulting from an asteroid impact 65 million years ago.
If all this talk of carbon fullerenes, RNA precursors and mass-giving bosons is hurting your head, take a break, run to the bathroom and find out just how much you pee.
ENGADGET: Alt-week 8.4.12: buckyballs, bosons and bodily fluids Alt
Research scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a process to pair quantum dots with fullerenes in photovoltaic cells in order to improve the effectiveness of solar panels on the nanoscale.
FORBES: Quantum Dots and Fullerenes Team Up For Better Nanoscale Solar Panels
Since they are better than anything else at bringing free radicals to a dead halt, fullerenes can elucidate precisely the roles the radicals play and why, like radicals everywhere, they make so much go wrong.
The two molecules are chemically linked, and the resulting dimer allows for interesting precision in the conversion of light to electricity, and the method of production that the Brookhaven scientists developed actually enables them to play around with different sized molecules fullerenes and quantum dots both.
FORBES: Quantum Dots and Fullerenes Team Up For Better Nanoscale Solar Panels
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