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A large fraction of the chemical elements that occur naturally on the Earth's surface are essential to the structure and metabolism of living things. Four of these elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen) are essential to every living thing and collectively make up 99% of the mass of protoplasm. [1]
The average 70 kg (150 lb) adult human body contains approximately 7 × 10 27 atoms and contains at least detectable traces of 60 chemical elements. [5] About 29 of these elements are thought to play an active positive role in life and health in humans.
The most important characteristics of carbon as a basis for the chemistry of cellular life are that each carbon atom is capable of forming up to four valence bonds with other atoms simultaneously, and that the energy required to make or break a bond with a carbon atom is at an appropriate level for building large and complex molecules which may ...
The idea that processes that can occur naturally in the environment and act to locally decrease entropy must be identified has been applied in examinations of phosphate's role in the origin of life, where the relevant setting for abiogenesis is an early Earth lake environment. One such process is the ability of phosphate to concentrate ...
The geologic component of the carbon cycle operates slowly in comparison to the other parts of the global carbon cycle. It is one of the most important determinants of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and thus of global temperatures. [29] Most of the Earth's carbon is stored inertly in the Earth's lithosphere. [7]
It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen. [17] The atoms of carbon can bond together in diverse ways, resulting in various allotropes of carbon. Well-known allotropes include graphite, diamond, amorphous carbon, and fullerenes. The physical properties of carbon vary widely with the allotropic form.
Atoms can attach to one or more other atoms by chemical bonds to form chemical compounds such as molecules or crystals. The ability of atoms to attach and detach from each other is responsible for most of the physical changes observed in nature. Chemistry is the science that studies these changes.
Most lipids consist of a polar or hydrophilic head (typically glycerol) and one to three non polar or hydrophobic fatty acid tails, and therefore they are amphiphilic. Fatty acids consist of unbranched chains of carbon atoms that are connected by single bonds alone (saturated fatty acids) or by both single and double bonds (unsaturated fatty ...