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, ...

A new allotrope of carbon has been produced. Like graphene, it is only one atom thick, but unlike graphene it behaves like a metal even at small scales, ideal for nanosized wires. This result is ...

A new reagent has moved carbon-atom transfer out of the chemical flatlands, allowing chemists to place a single carbon atom so that it makes bonds to four different substituents. The reagent makes ...

In new research, scientists have created cyclocarbon – or a ring-like structure comprising only carbon. This has taken decades of research. The synthesis of the spherical carbon is the created of IBM ...

Which is your favourite chemical element? To mark the International Year of the Periodic Table, our science journalists will be arguing for their pick from the 118 known elements. In this instalment, ...

The boom in natural gas production has been essential to the drop in carbon emissions in the US, as methane, the primary component of natural gas, releases more energy for each carbon atom when burned ...

To support an informed analysis of the possibilities for life in the cosmos, this chapter summarizes chemical concepts needed to evaluate the plausibility of a potential exotic life form and shows how ...

Chemist and writer Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table—a memoir in the form of short stories about elements—closes with a chapter called “Carbon,” which tracks a single atom through time and space.