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Diamonds hold a special place in our imagination: they’re valuable, extremely hard, and sometimes just really pretty. Chemically speaking, diamonds are simple – they’re carbon. Carbon is an important element. All living things are made of compounds that contain carbon. One property of carbon is its ability to form allotropes. Allotropes contain the same element,…

Birds are an important part of many ecosystems. New Australian research shows that bird feathers could be used to measure just how healthy some ecosystems are.

Symmetry can be tricky, especially when you’re a chemist. Grab some plasticine and discover why a mirror doesn’t always make a perfect copy.

How would you find out where to strike gold? Turns out termites might have the answer.

Do you have left over fruit and vegetable scraps? One day you might be able to use them to clean up the environment!

A research team on board Australia’s Marine National Facility research vessel, Southern Surveyor, have made an unusual discovery: an island that isn’t there.

Written by Jarrod Green If Lawrence Bragg was still alive he really could be boastful. This November marks the centenary of crystallography. It’s a powerful technique Bragg helped to develop for studying the structure of chemicals.

Chemical formulas, such as H2O (water) and CO2 (carbon dioxide), are handy as they identify which atoms are present in a chemical compound. This can in turn help to make predictions about their properties. But only knowing which atoms make up a compound sometimes isn’t enough. It helps to know how the atoms are arranged.

Follow these instructions and create a work of art out of bubbles, while learning some maths.

A few months ago, Science by Email reported on the naming of two superheavy elements, flerovium and livermorium. Now a team from Japan has reported making a third atom of another, new superheavy element with an atomic number of 113.