Carbon tubes As well as carbon spheres in many sizes, scientists have discovered tubes of carbon. Nanotubes formed in this way are a series of tubes packed inside each other. When a tiny dose of cobalt, nickel or iron catalyst is added during manufacture, the result is an empty nanotube with a wall just one atom thick. You can imagine an empty nanotube as being formed from a flat sheet of graphite. The sheet, like a length of chicken wire, is rolled into a cylinder with the opposite edges forming a perfect join.
Nanotubes exhibit some peculiar characteristics.
For example, experiments suggest that they are incredibly tough. This means it could be possible to have two concentric nanotubes, one inside the other, the outer one acting as an insulator and the inner one conducting a current. One day, perhaps, they will have a major impact on our lives. In the meantime, hundreds or even thousands of chemists, physicists and molecular biologists in laboratories around the world continue to play molecular football with these most intriguing of structures. Finding the molecular structure of buckyballs 2.