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, ...

Graphyne is a crystalline form of carbon that is distinct from both diamond and graphite. Unlike diamond, where each atom possesses four immediate neighbors, or graphite, where each atom has three, ...

The most well-known forms of carbon include graphite and diamond, but there are other more exotic nanoscale allotropes of carbon as well. These include graphene and fullerenes, which are sp2 ...

More than five hundred crystalline forms of carbon have been theoretically predicted to date, but few have been synthesized. In most of the existing crystalline carbons, each atom has either 4 ...

Carbon can arrange itself into one of the hardest materials in nature, or into one so soft that children inscribe trails of it on paper. Several decades ago, scientists started wondering: Aside from ...

A complex form of carbon crucial for life on Earth has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time. Its presence helps show how the compounds needed for life could come from space. The ...

Carbon, one of the most versatile elements known, occurs in a multitude of allotropes that exhibit a wide array of physical and chemical properties. The diversity of carbon’s bonding—ranging from sp² ...