Now 20 years later, scientists have figured out how to turn them into Buckybombs.
These nanoscale explosives show potential for use in fighting cancer, with the hope that they could one day target and eliminate cancer at the cellular level — triggering tiny explosions that kill cancer cells without affecting surrounding tissue.
“Future applications would probably use other types of carbon structures — such as carbon nanotubes, but we started with Bucky-balls because they’re very stable and a lot is known about them,” said Oleg Prezhdo, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author of a paper on the explosives that was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry on Feb. 24.
Prezhdo collaborated with co-corresponding author Vitaly Chaban, who was at USC when the research was completed and is now at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil with fellow co-corresponding author Eudes Eterno Fileti.
The research was funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the U.S. Department of Energy (grant DE-SC0006527) and the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 14-43-00052).
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