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Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Now is probably the most appropriate time to ask yourself that. A girl named Clara Lazen recently discovered a previously unknown molecule — and she hasn't even graduated from grade school yet.
Clara's fifth-grade teacher, Ken Boehr, handed his students molecule model building toys during science class one day. The curious 10-year-old built a model that she thought looked stable with atoms that fit together perfectly, not knowing that nobody had ever thought of it before.
Intrigued by the model his student built, Boehr snapped some pictures of it and sent them to his college friend, Robert Zoellner, who's now a chemistry professor at Humboldt State University in California. Upon further inspection, Zoellner determined that the molecule was indeed a new discovery. He dubbed it tetranitratoxycarbon, and wrote a research paper on it that was just published in a major journal called Computational and Theoretical Chemistry. Clara, who's probably never heard of the journal before, was named one of his co-authors.
Nobody knows what the molecule can actually do — it's something that we'll find out if and when a chemist succeeds in synthesizing it. But while Zoellner is still wondering whether it could store energy or create large explosions, Clara's already thinking of what she can do with it: "I could sell this to the military for money."
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