Honoring the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the “buckyball”, a spherical dome of exotic carbon molecules, on September 4, Internet search giant Google has a special animated Google Doodle in place - replacing the middle ‘O’ of its logo with a special orange-colored animated logo, which forms into the “buckyball”.

The interactive, animated logo can be twisted and turned by the users by scrolling their mouse.

The “buckyball” – or fullerene, which has “buckminsterfullerene” as is its official name - is that molecule which is made up entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. The molecule got its name from the geodesic dome that was designed by the late American engineer, the visionary architect R. Buckminster Fuller, in 1967 for the world’s fair in Montreal.

However, it was on September 4, 1985, that the carbon was discovered by three scientists while they were trying to figure out the structure of a carbon molecule called C60 as they played around with toothpicks and jellybeans. One of the scientists started sticking his jellybean atoms together in the shape of alternating pentagons and hexagons; and, interestingly, the structure began to curve into a ball.

For their discovery, the scientists - Sir Harold Kroto, from the University of Sussex; Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, both of Rice University, Houston, Texas – won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996.