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 ...

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 ...

What does the inside of a carbon atom’s nucleus look like? A new study by Forschungszentrum Jülich, Michigan State University (USA) and the University of Bonn provides the first comprehensive answer ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Chemically, carbon dioxide is incredibly simple—it is just one carbon atom linked with two oxygen atoms. Together they create a colorless gas that makes up just a tiny fraction of the Earth's ...

The carbon-hydrogen bond -- 2/3 of all bonds in hydrocarbons -- has defied chemists' attempts to open it up and add new chemical groups. A team has now cracked the strongest of C-H bonds, those on a ...

Matter is made up of very small parts called atoms. Atoms can combine in different numbers and in different ways to make different molecules. Atoms and molecules make up all of the different ...