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, ...

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.

In its purest form, iron is neither exceptionally strong nor hard - in fact, a block of pure iron could be cut with a knife. The addition of carbon and the removal of oxygen are what give iron-based ...

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