Have you ever found yourself struggling all day with writing a paper, then finally you get a good, hard, half hour of work done and nothing feels better? Then have you ever woken up with drool on your study notes, only to find that your productiveness was a dream?
Welcome to my paper on the Toxicity of C60 Fullerenes! To be fair, I'm actually have a great time with this assignment... I can't remember the last time I found a subject as fascinating as nanotech and nanotoxicology. Nanoparticles are generally defined as a compound that is less than 100 nm in at least one dimension. To put it into perspective, 1/1000 of a metre is a millimeter... 1/1000 of a millimeter is a micrometer... and 1/1000 of a micrometer is 1 nanometer. That's 0.000000001 metres, aka very small.
My paper is devoted to the highly variable toxicity exhibited by fullerenes with different functional groups attached to their surfaces. C60 (pictured above) is basically a soccer-ball shaped frame upon (or even within) which a variety of compounds can be bonded. They have lots of promising applications, especially in medicine for imaging and drug delivery, but little is known about their toxicity. Some are good, some are bad, some go back and forth depending on their mood. Let's hope the toxicologists and regulators can keep on top of the technologies!
Be sure you'll be hearing more from me about fullerene derivatives, nanowires, quantum dots, and other cool things from the world of the very small!
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