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, ...

The periodic table, also called the periodic table of elements, is an organized arrangement of the 118 known chemical elements. The chemical elements are arranged from left to right and top to bottom ...

You may have noticed that the rock formations are very different colors. The rock formations on the left are from Red Rock State Park in Texas, and on the right is El Capitan Mountain in Yosemite ...

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.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

It has long been theorized that hydrogen, helium, and lithium were the only chemical elements in existence during the Big Bang, and that supernova explosions are responsible for transmuting these ...