Melting metal in a home foundry, backyard metalcasting, metal casting. How-to: Thermite hard drive destruction. Stars reveal carbon 'spaceballs' 22 July 2010Last updated at 19:14 By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News The football-shaped molecules are the largest molecules ever found in space Scientists have detected the largest molecules ever seen in space, in a cloud of cosmic dust surrounding a distant star.
The football-shaped carbon molecules are known as buckyballs, and were only discovered on Earth 25 years ago when they were made in a laboratory. Huge Asphalt Volcanoes Discovered Off California. First discovered in 2007, the seven mounds sit about 700 feet (213 meters) beneath the ocean, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) offshore from Santa Barbara ( see map ).
Recent explorations using a submarine robot named Alvin have revealed that the largest dome is about as wide as two football fields laid side by side and is as tall as a six-story building. (Related: "Iceland Volcano Creates 27-Story 'Mountain.'" ) The domes are made mostly of petroleum, or crude oil—essentially the same stuff used to pave highways and parking lots and the raw material for gasoline. "If I could convert all the asphalt in the largest volcano to gasoline, it would be enough to fuel my Honda Civic for about half a billion miles," said lead study author David Valentine , an earth scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But there's little point in harvesting the asphalt mounds for fuel, he added, as "the quality of the material is very poor. ...