One of the key demands of the UK's school climate-strike movement is that more attention is paid to climate change in the curriculum. To help address this, researchers at Oxford's Environmental Change Institute and Department ...
Education
Sep 20, 2019
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4
In independent studies, two Princeton University research teams recently identified surprisingly large sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being leaked into the atmosphere. Pound for pound, methane causes a far ...
Environment
Sep 20, 2019
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27
"Strike for climate action" is the watchword coming not from the shop steward but the C-suite as many companies publicise their support for Friday's mobilisation, but positioning to capture consumers that isn't translated ...
Environment
Sep 20, 2019
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16
Global one-day strikes, driven by young people demanding action against climate change, are planned for Sept. 20 and 27, sandwiched around a meeting next week of world leaders on the issue at the United Nations. The protests ...
Environment
Sep 20, 2019
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9
The political leeway for carbon taxes is greater than commonly assumed. Political scientists at ETH have shown how carbon taxes could find acceptance in Germany and the U.S.. What matters most is the intended use of the tax ...
Economics & Business
Sep 19, 2019
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In early October 2016, a tropical storm named Nicole formed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It roamed for six days, reaching Category 4 hurricane status with powerful 140 mile-per hour-winds, before hitting the tiny ...
Environment
Sep 19, 2019
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19
Synthetic fuels, made using carbon captured from the air, farm waste or biomass, could help the transport sector reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and meet "net-zero" greenhouse gas emission goals.
Materials Science
Sep 19, 2019
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20
More than two decades ago, Professor Andrew Oswald worked at the London School of Economics, UK, when he organised what he says was the world's first conference on the economics of happiness. He put up posters, invited speakers, ...
Social Sciences
Sep 19, 2019
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259
Anew report shows low carbon measures in cities could reduce urban emissions by nearly 90 percent and support 87 million jobs worldwide by 2030.
Environment
Sep 19, 2019
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17
This Friday in the lead-up to the United Nations climate summit, children and adults worldwide will go on strike for stronger action on climate change. However, you may ask, is striking effective? What can it really hope ...
Environment
Sep 18, 2019
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Carbon (pronounced /ˈkɑrbən/) is the chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6. As a member of group 14 on the periodic table, it is nonmetallic and tetravalent—making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. There are three naturally occurring isotopes, with 12C and 13C being stable, while 14C is radioactive, decaying with a half-life of about 5730 years. Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity. The name "carbon" comes from Latin language carbo, coal, and, in some Romance and Slavic languages, the word carbon can refer both to the element and to coal.
There are several allotropes of carbon of which the best known are graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon. The physical properties of carbon vary widely with the allotropic form. For example, diamond is highly transparent, while graphite is opaque and black. Diamond is among the hardest materials known, while graphite is soft enough to form a streak on paper (hence its name, from the Greek word "to write"). Diamond has a very low electrical conductivity, while graphite is a very good conductor. Under normal conditions, diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of all known materials. All the allotropic forms are solids under normal conditions but graphite is the most thermodynamically stable.
All forms of carbon are highly stable, requiring high temperature to react even with oxygen. The most common oxidation state of carbon in inorganic compounds is +4, while +2 is found in carbon monoxide and other transition metal carbonyl complexes. The largest sources of inorganic carbon are limestones, dolomites and carbon dioxide, but significant quantities occur in organic deposits of coal, peat, oil and methane clathrates. Carbon forms more compounds than any other element, with almost ten million pure organic compounds described to date, which in turn are a tiny fraction of such compounds that are theoretically possible under standard conditions.
Carbon is one of the least abundant elements in the Earth's crust, but the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known lifeforms, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen. This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
