A new study in the journal Nano Letters describes a simple way to make buckyballs ten million times less toxic.

Buckyballs, nanometer-wide carbon molecules, show promise in everything from fuel cells to pharmaceuticals, but early studies raised concerns about their toxicity. Rice University’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology compared the toxicity of pure and modified buckyballs and found the greater the degree of surface modification, the lower the toxicity.

Rice University news release