Matryoshka cluster
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs


The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.05 nm. A six-inch nesting doll is about two hundred million times taller.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Matryoshka. Formally [Sb@Pd12@Sb20]3−.
- Height
- 0.81 nm on an edge, 0.69 nm on a face.
- Weight
- 6.4 zeptograms. No carbon, no hydrogen.
- Symmetry
- Ih, like a buckyball.
- Build
- An Sb atom, in an icosahedron of 12 Pd, in a dodecahedron of 20 Sb.
- Bonds
- Sixty spokes between the shells. The shells barely hold hands.
- Charges
- Seen at 4−, 3−, 1− and 1+. Should flinch at 4−, unseen by X-rays.
- Associates
- An arsenic-nickel twin. A “bronze matryoshka” stuck in its crystal.
- Last seen
- In black needle crystals, in a lab in Fuzhou.
of them in the black needle of crystal that sat for its X-ray, give or take.
You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Matryoshka cluster, No. 111 of the exotic forty. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
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