Geeky Mimi

Kenneth Boehr wasn’t expecting more than the usual from his ten-year-old students when he started a lesson on the Periodic table and handed out the molecule modeling kits. Then Clara Lazen handed him a model constructed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon atoms, and asked if she’d made a real chemical or not. Boehr found himself stumped. So he took a cellphone picture of the whole deal, and sent it to an old college buddy: Robert Zoellner, professor of chemistry at Humbolt State University. Turns out, Clara had, in fact, put together an entirely new, but viable molecule. And on top of that, if it can be synthesized, it has the potential to store energy, opening up some pretty wide applications.