New studies of the “platypus of materials” help explain how their atoms arrange themselves into orderly, but nonrepeating, ...

Carbon is often referred to as "the bedrock of life" because the element appears in all known life forms. This is because the sixth entry on the periodic table has the unique ability to form the ...

Chemists studying how life started often focus on how modern biopolymers like peptides and nucleic acids contributed, but modern biopolymers don't form easily without help from living organisms. A ...

A potpourri of 1,800 chemical compounds were found to have formed or have the potential to form and be emitted as vapors from 177 underground storage tanks holding radioactive and chemical waste at ...

A new approach for activating chemical reactions based on the element selenium has been tested by scientists. They demonstrated that selenium can form bonds similar to those of hydrogen bonds, ...

Analysis of organic compounds -- called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) -- extracted from the Ryugu asteroid and Murchison meteorite has found that certain PAHs likely formed in the cold areas ...