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The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

Administrators and scientists are excited by buckyballs for their own sake, and if they turn out to have practical applications, so much the better.

In 2009, novelty toymaker Maxfield & Oberton released Buckyballs, sets of curiously powerful magnetic marbles that became the most popular cubicle toy since the Rubik's Cube, selling more than 2 million units in 15 countries.

I realized immediately that this was a terribly important discovery, but I didn't realize how important it would be until we had spent a lot of time in the laboratory studying it.

Football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical formula for splitting the atom.

I was planning to be a baseball player until I ran into something called a curveball. And that set me back.

I had a ball doing Harry Potter.

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

I'm not a ball in a pinball machine. I know what I want.

It took me a while to realize that basketball wasn't football.