Scientists model 'Lord of the Nanorings'

It's possible that no one gets more use out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's PrairieFire supercomputer, than Xiao Cheng Zeng and his collaborators.
In the past five years, they have used PrairieFire to model a list of previously unknown nanoscale substances and structures, from two-dimensional ice that shrinks when it freezes (the so-called "Nebraska" ice) to silicon nanotubes that behave like metals and four new kinds of one-dimensional ice crystals.
Now, they have modeled what they jokingly call the "Lord of the Nanorings," a ring of 20 boron atoms that is so stable that the rings can be stacked to create a tube of virtually any length with a diameter of a mere 2.6 nanometers.