The active ingredient in many drugs is what's known as a small molecule: bigger than water, much smaller than an antibody and mainly made of carbon. It's tough, however, to make these molecules if ...

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, ...

Japanese scientists unveil a catalyst that turns CO₂ into liquid methanol at room temperature with 100% efficiency.

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 ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? Scientists have set up and observed a single electron bond between two carbon ...

Together, the two methods should enable medicinal chemists to make these single-atom substitutions in a swath of common molecules, easing efforts to generate analogues of drug candidates. “This is the ...