Functional hollow carbon nanospheres by latex templating.

A facile and sustainable synthesis of hollow carbonaceous nanospheres is presented, offering a scalable and multifunctional route to the generation of useful nanocontainers, which critically possess the stability not offered by polymeric equivalents and functionality not afforded by other nanocarbons. Carbonization temperature provides a subtle but elegant mechanism to control structure and thereby hydrophobicity, nanopartitioning, and permeation between the inner and outer space.