Feeling cagey

Researchers have discovered that gold can take the shape of nanoscale, hollow cages similar to carbon buckyballs. Lai-Sheng Wang of Washington State University in Richland, Xiao Cheng Zeng of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and their coworkers bombarded a piece of gold with a laser in a vacuum and studied the clusters that arose.

Typically, “metals like to form close-packed structures,” says Wang.