This is a large buckyball molecule – which is to say, a form of carbon, the same stuff in pencil leads and engagement rings, formed into a more geometrically useful pattern. The “bucky-” part of the name came from R. Buckminster Fuller, who loved (among other things) using straight lines to make spheres.
Since the 1990s, scientists have loved making everything from nanocircuits to super-efficient lubricants out of buckyballs.
And Wikimedia Commons user Brian0918 used some free software to make this stereoscopic 3D view of a 540-atom buckyball molecule. Dude.
