Gels are something of a puzzle for chemists. These jelly-like materials are not quite solid and yet not liquid either. Gels live in a kind of chemical twilight zone where they share many properties of both phases of matter.
So confusing is this, that chemists find it hard even to define what it is to be a gel, or what properties its components must have.
One thing they agree on however is that gels consist of at least two components: a liquid component and a solid component that forms into a loose network which binds the substance together. This is how the jelly-like properties arise.
Now even that piece of common-lore might have to change. Today, Patrick Royall at the University of Bristol in the UK and Stephen Williams at the Australian National University say that C60, the soccer ball form of carbon, can form into a gel all by itself.
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