Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist in San Francisco, California. For a little more than a century, chemists have known that strong atomic links called covalent bonds are formed when atoms ...

The distribution of outermost shell electrons, known as valence electrons, of organic molecules was observed for the first time. As the interactions between atoms are governed by the valence electrons ...

A common iron mineral hiding in soil turns out to be far better at trapping carbon than scientists realized. Its surface ...

A group of researchers at the University of Tokyo have spent years testing the limits of chemical bonds. And now, after years of work, they've finally explored an idea originally proposed in 1931: a ...