CHEMISTRY
Skeptical eyebrows were raised in 1985 when three chemists reported that they had stumbled onto a new form of molecular carbon that they believed, but could not prove, had the shape of a soccer ball. Nobody is skeptical anymore. Not only has their theory been confirmed, but it has blossomed into a thriving branch of research. And last week that trio of chemists--Harold Kroto from Britain's University of Sussex, and Robert Curl and Richard Smalley from Rice University in Houston--were rewarded for their work with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
They made their serendipitous discovery by zapping graphite with a laser beam and mixing the resulting carbon vapor with a stream of helium. When they examined the crystallized residue, they found molecules made of 60 carbon atoms. Guessing (correctly) that these structures resembled Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, they named them "buckminsterfullerenes"--"buckyballs" for short.
Today scientists manufacture buckyballs by the pound and in a variety of sizes and shapes, from flat sheets to long filaments. Some can hold atoms of other elements in their hollow interiors; others can conduct electricity. Given the versatility of buckyballs, scientists predict that they will someday be used for, among other things, drug-delivery systems, superfine electrical wires and hairlike tubes of unprecedented tensile strength.
PHYSICS
Cornell University researchers David Lee, Robert Richardson and Douglas Osheroff made their Nobel-winning discovery in 1972. They were working with helium-3, a rare isotope of the common gas, looking for a "phase transition," analogous to the changes in water when it turns from vapor to liquid and from liquid to ice. They had cooled a sample to within two one-thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (-459.67[degrees] F), the temperature at which atomic motion ceases.
As they were charting the changing pressures, the Nobel citation states, "it was Osheroff's vigilant eye that noticed small extra jumps in the curve." Those jumps, it turned out, represented the change of helium-3 into a superfluid, a liquid with no viscosity that can climb up and over the walls of its container and exhibits other bizarre quantum behavior ordinarily observed only in subatomic particles.
The discovery may turn out to have repercussions on a far grander scale. Subsequent experiments with superfluid helium-3 have lent support to the theory that the creation of hypothetical structures called cosmic strings a fraction of a second after the Big Bang led eventually to the formation of the galaxies.
PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE
For decades, the best minds in immunology had failed to solve this riddle: Why did the immune system evolve to reject something--an organ transplant--that didn't become common until the 20th century? In the 1970s a couple of outsiders, working in relative isolation in Australia, hit on the answer. Australian Peter Doherty, who trained as a veterinary surgeon, and Dr. Rolf Zinkernagel, a Swiss specialist in tropical diseases, figured out that the rejection response was actually a by-product of the body's basic virus-defense system.