For a hundred dollars, in fact, anyone can buy nanoparticles—specifically a gram of carbon nanotubes—online. Place the order, and you'll receive a small ziplock bag of what looks like soot tucked inside a cardboard FedEx envelope along with some safety instructions. (They recommend gloves to keep the carbon slivers off the skin and a respirator to keep the tiny black specks from entering the lungs.)

There's not much you can do at home with a thimbleful of carbon nanotubes. But some of their mysteries are revealed in another Rice University lab, where Matteo Pasquali holds up a test tube containing a few dark threads so stiff that they seem to have been starched and ironed. These are fibers spun from carbon nanotubes—several billion of them—which, in theory, should be stronger than Kevlar, the material in bulletproof vests.

For now, however, the threads are only about as tough as the acrylic found in an ordinary sweater. The reason the threads are weak, Pasquali believes, is because some portion of the billion nanotubes bundled together have hidden breaks. A photo taken through a microscope shows fibers that look like pale gray hairs, some perfectly straight, others frayed and curling. "We have split ends," Pasquali says with a sigh. "We need a nanotube conditioner."

Carbon has proved a useful element in nanotechnology. One of the science's building blocks is a molecule that contains 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere. A molecule of C6o looks like the geodesic dome invented by Buckminster Fuller, thus its nickname: buckyball.

Richard Smalley and colleagues discovered the buckyball in 1985, and in 1996 Smalley and two others earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry for the deed. Until his recent death, Smalley was a bucky fanatic. He renovated his house, close to the Rice University campus in Houston, with a glass skylight shaped like half a buckyball, with precisely proportioned steel struts representing the bonds between atoms.

Smalley was openly proselytical about the merits of buckyballs and a particular fan of their relatives, carbon nanotubes. ("Fifty to a hundred times stronger than steel and one-sixth the weight!" he often pronounced as though reporting the achievements of a precocious child.)