Super Buckyball (超級珠璣碳球)

The first super Buckyball, C₄₅₀₀, was created by students (class 3Gong 三恭) from the Taipei First Girls High School (TFGH) 北一女中 today. Each unit in this beautiful bead model is a punctured C60 with three holes surrounded by a neck of five heptagons. It took them exactly one week to construct it. The diameter of this small super Buckyball (made of 6750 6mm beads) is about 40 cm already. They might still need to clean all the loose ends up later next week.

In addition to this small super Buckyball, I am still working with teachers and some other students from the TFGH on a bigger super Buckyball made of 12mm beads. Hopefully, we can have the whole structure done early next week. Since the total weight of this model is going to be eight times of this small super Buckyball, so we need to be very careful about the rigidity of each units and necks connecting them. I name these kinds of bead models as "超級珠璣碳球" in Chinese which means literally "the super bead carbon ball".

(I found many pictures at TFGS's website. http://web.fg.tp.edu.tw/~chemistry/blog/?page_id=2&nggpage=8, 2012/9/1)