Carbon 60 otherwise known as fullerene or buckminsterfullerene is a completely enclosed ball of carbon atoms with the same geometry as a regular football. It was imagined by a british chemist 50 or 60 years ago by the name of Young and accurately described around he same time by Osawa in japan. At this time though C60 hadn't been found in nature. Smalley an American and his collegues found wavelengths for the c60 molecule in the stars but it took them a little while to realize its structure. There's quite a few 60 carbon molecules. Luckily they had a football and noticed a structure in that, that was it. Later when Kroto created it in a laboratory by hitting graphite with a high power laser in an inert atmosphere Smalley won the Nobel prize in chemistry.
Now its made by passing an arc of high voltage and ampage between graphite electodes in the presence of an inert gas. The resulting soot contains a high percentage of carbon 60. As this sublimes at 450 degrees celcius it can be separated from the soot which doesn't and re-condensed .
Easier methods involve the use of solvents like toluene .
Carbon 60 has numerous applications. Nanotechnology, cosmetics and medicine are a few.
On e of the more recent trends has been to use carbon 60 powder to make "bucky oil"
This, depending on the thickness of the item being viewed, ranges in colour from amber orange to a deep red and black.Coconut oil with c60 dissolved in it appears purple. The difference in color is due to the density of the fat molecules in the oil immediately surrounding the carbon 60 molecules. Coconut oil is denser being more saturated with hydrogen atoms.
At first I didn't think a molecule only composed of carbon atoms would have any effect. After all the other forms of carbon-(graphite and diamond ) that I knew of were pretty much inert as far as our bodies were concerned
but it turned out there was a mountain of evidence disagreeing with that.
After researching it myself I decided to make my own carbon 60 olive oil. Here's a brief video of how that went:
