Buckyballs, a spherical form of carbon discovered in 1985 and an important material in the new field of nanotechnology, can cause extensive brain damage in fish, according to research presented Sunday at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California. Eva Oberdoerster, an environmental toxicologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said the buckyballs also altered the behavior of genes in liver cells of the juvenile largemouth bass she studied.