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Buckyball bearings

HOW can you 鈥渙il鈥 a nanomachine when conventional lubricants clog the miniature mechanisms?

Physicists at the Aichi University of Education and Seikei University in Japan have found a solution 鈥 using football-shaped carbon-60 molecules, or buckyballs, as tiny ball bearings.

The researchers placed a layer of buckyballs between two sheets of graphite, and will report in a future issue of Physical Review Letters that the sheets slipped over each other without any friction.

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