These exceptionally strong bonds can only be broken by a huge amount of energy. ![]() Diamonds, in contrast, are linked three-dimensionally. Penciling something in actually is just scratching layers of graphite onto paper. Graphite ("the writing stone") is made up of loosely connected sheets of carbon formed like chicken wire. "Structure controls carbon's properties," says Nyman. WE DISCOVERED TWO NEW FORMS OF IT ONLY RECENTLY.Ĭarbon is found in four major forms: graphite, diamonds, fullerenes, and graphene. It teams up with oxygen and other substances to form large parts of the inanimate world, like rocks and minerals. Our bodies are 18.5 percent carbon, by weight.Īnd yet it can be inorganic as well, Nyman says. So animals, plants, every living cell, and of course humans are a product of catenation. Every living thing is built on a backbone of carbon (with nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements). It forms chains and rings, in a process chemists call catenation. "It makes up all life forms, and in the number of substances it makes, the fats, the sugars, there is a huge diversity," she says. May Nyman, a professor of inorganic chemistry at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon tells Mental Floss that carbon has an almost unbelievable range. NEARLY 20 PERCENT OF YOUR BODY IS CARBON. (Plastics! Drugs! Gasoline!) More importantly, those bonds are both strong and flexible. It can form four bonds, which it does with many other elements, creating hundreds of thousands of compounds, some of which we use daily. ![]() The name carbon derives from the French charbon, or coal. Lavoisier first listed it as an element in his textbook Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, published in 1789. By analyzing the residue found in the jar, he was able to show that diamond was comprised solely of carbon. He used the apparatus, called a solar furnace, to burn a diamond in a glass jar. Lavoisier used an instrument that focused the Sun's rays using lenses which had a diameter of about four feet. While humans have known carbon as coal and-after burning-soot for thousands of years, it was Antoine Lavoisier who, in 1772, showed that it was in fact a unique chemical entity. While its older cousins hydrogen and helium are believed to have been formed during the tumult of the Big Bang, carbon is thought to stem from a buildup of alpha particles in supernova explosions, a process called supernova nucleosynthesis. ![]() It is the fourth most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen, and 15th in the Earth's crust. Six protons, six neutrons, six electrons. It sits right at the top of the periodic table, wedged in between boron and nitrogen. IT'S ONE OF THE MOST ABUNDANT ELEMENTS IN THE UNIVERSE. If we play around with it, we can coax it into plastics, paints, and all kinds of chemicals. It binds atoms to one another, forming humans, animals, plants and rocks. "Water may be the solvent of the universe," writes Natalie Angier in her classic introduction to science, The Canon, "but carbon is the duct tape of life." Not only is carbon duct tape, it's one hell of a duct tape. It's in every living thing, and in quite a few dead ones. How can a lump of coal and a shining diamond be composed of the same material? Here are eight things you probably didn't know about carbon. Carbon is the backbone of every living thing-and yet it just might cause the end of life on Earth as we know it. How well do you know the periodic table? Our series The Elements explores the fundamental building blocks of the observable universe-and their relevance to your life-one by one.
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