Where would carbon-based life be without carbon? There are 118 known chemical elements, but carbon is the fourth most abundant and perhaps the most important to human life. Everywhere you look, ...

Brown University chemists have provided direct evidence that upends the textbook explanation of how triple chemical bonds ...

The bonds between clusters of elements in the fourteenth group of the periodic table are known to be fickle. Ranging from the nonmetal carbon, to the metalloids silicon and germanium, to the metals ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Robert Hazen is one of five expert speakers ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Using NASA’s Spitzer Telescope, an international research team has found evidence that some stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy have both carbon and oxygen in the dust that ...

We preselected all newsletters you had before unsubscribing.

After two decades of debate, scientists are getting closer to figuring out exactly what the sun — and thus the whole universe — is made of. The sun is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. There are ...