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, ...

An elusive wreath of carbon has made its long-awaited debut. Scientists created a molecule called cyclocarbon and imaged its structure, describing the ring of 18 carbon atoms online August 15 in ...

It’s difficult to make molecules using elements that lie beyond uranium on the periodic table, which has hampered progress in studying how actinides form bonds. Now chemists have expanded the library ...

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, ...

Carbon, the building block of life, is thought to have formed mainly inside the cores of stars. But a new experiment is testing another idea: some of it may have been forged during supernova blasts or ...

If you were to take every element in the periodic table and order them by how abundant they are in the Universe, you'd find something a little bit surprising. The most common element is hydrogen, ...

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.