A Missourian who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for helping to discover a new form of carbon has died in Houston, Texas. Richard Smalley was a professor at Rice University when he and two other chemists discovered buckminsterfullerene. It’s a material whose molecular structure resembles the geodesic dome design of Buckminister Fullee. Smalley grew up in Kansas City where he says he and his mother collected single-clled organisms from a local pond and studied them under a microscope and where his parents taught him the immportance of ideas, the beauty of nature, mechanics and electrical science.