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Fullerene cages that break the isolated pentagon rule are rare and often unstable. Now a range of fullerenes that feature three sequentially fused pentagons of carbon have been stabilized by chlorination.

Molecular assembly is of great importance in many fields. Here, the authors establish a strategy to post-modulate angle-mismatched layer-by-layer materials by fullerene derivatives and achieve a modulation accuracy of up to 5 Å.

A Gd@C₈₂ molecule shows electric polarization switching behaviour under a gate bias voltage, thus demonstrating a single-molecule electret device.

The structure of C₆₀ is well-known: a perfectly symmetrical sphere of 12 isolated pentagons. But this is only one of 1,812 possible isomers, and the only one to obey the isolated-pentagon rule. So far it has been the only form observed. But now two isomers without isolated pentagons have been made.

Although ammonia synthesis represents a major chemical industry, developing highly effective non-iron catalysts is a challenging task. Now it has been shown that anchoring fullerene onto non-iron transition metals separates and activates catalytic sites for hydrogen and nitrogen intermediates, boosting ammonia synthesis rates.

Trimetallic carbido clusterfullerenes (CCFs) represent the simplest metal carbido complexes with the ligands being only carbon atoms, but the formation prerequisite is unclear. Herein, the authors report the syntheses of three novel vanadium(V)-based CCFs featuring high vanadium valence state and propose a supplemental Octet Rule

Chemical manipulation of fullerenes has allowed the production of heptagon-containing fullerenes, but they have not been synthesised using bottom-up approaches. Here, a heptagon-containing fullerene[68] is obtained as C₆₈Cl₆from a carbon arc plasma.

Single-molecule electronics provide the potential solution for high-density integration and low-power consumption in massive data-driven applications, but have yet to be explored. Here, the authors report low-power logic-in-memory operations, based on single electric dipole flipping in the two-terminal single-metallofullerene device at room temperature.

The structures of fullerenes, or buckyballs, are often very difficult to resolve. Here, the authors describe a decapyrrylcorannulene host with ten flexible pyrryl groups that can efficiently co-crystallize with diverse fullerene derivatives in a ‘hand-ball-hand’ fashion, allowing crystallographic identification of commonly known types of fullerenes.

All-carbon electronics holds promise beyond the conventional silicon-based electronics, but it remains challenging to manufacture them with well-defined structures thus tunability. Tan et al. control charge transport in single-molecule junctions using different fullerenes between graphene electrodes.

The most stable fullerenes obey the isolated-pentagon rule (IPR): hexagons of carbon atoms entirely surround pentagons to minimize strain. Recently, some examples of fused-pentagon fullerenes have been reported and this Review summarizes current work to stabilize non-IPR fullerenes.