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  2. Carbon - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon

    Carbon's abundance, its unique diversity of organic compounds, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, enables this element to serve as a common element of all known life. It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.

  3. Carbon-based life - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-based_life

    Carbon atoms bond readily to other carbon atoms; this allows the building of arbitrarily long macromolecules and polymers in a process known as catenation. [ 20 ] [ 21 ] [ 22 ] "What we normally think of as 'life' is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorus", per Stephen Hawking in a 2008 lecture ...

  4. Carbon group - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_group

    Carbon is a key element to all known life. It is in all organic compounds, for example, DNA, steroids, and proteins. [6] Carbon's importance to life is primarily due to its ability to form numerous bonds with other elements. [17] There are 16 kilograms of carbon in a typical 70-kilogram human. [18] Silicon-based life's feasibility is commonly ...

  5. Biological roles of the elements - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_roles_of_the...

    Selenium, which is an essential element for animals and prokaryotes and is a beneficial element for many plants, is the least-common of all the elements essential to life. [ 3 ] [ 63 ] Selenium acts as the catalytic center of several antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase , [ 11 ] and plays a wide variety of other biological roles .

  6. CHNOPS - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHNOPS

    Graphic representation of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. CHNOPS and CHON are mnemonic acronyms for the most common elements in living organisms. "CHON" stands for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which together make up more than 95 percent of the mass of biological systems. [1] "CHNOPS" adds phosphorus and ...

  7. Organic chemistry - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry

    Organic compounds form the basis of all earthly life and constitute the majority of known chemicals. The bonding patterns of carbon, with its valence of four—formal single, double, and triple bonds, plus structures with delocalized electrons —make the array of organic compounds structurally diverse, and their range of applications enormous.

  8. Carbon compounds - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_compounds

    Carbon compounds are defined as chemical substances containing carbon. [1] [2] More compounds of carbon exist than any other chemical element except for hydrogen. Organic carbon compounds are far more numerous than inorganic carbon compounds. In general bonds of carbon with other elements are covalent bonds.

  9. Graphite - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite

    Graphite (/ ˈ ɡ r æ f aɪ t /) is a crystalline allotrope (form) of the element carbon. It consists of many stacked layers of graphene, typically in the excess of hundreds of layers. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable form of carbon under standard conditions.