What is carbon and why is it the building block of life?
Carbon's Four Handshakes
What is carbon and why is it the building block of life?
Somewhere inside you — in your fingernails, your eyelashes, the breath you just exhaled — sits a tiny atom that almost everything alive is built from. Its name is carbon. It's not flashy. It doesn't sparkle or glow. And yet it might be the most sociable little thing in the entire universe.
An atom is a unimaginably small building block of matter, and what makes one atom different from another is how many connections it likes to make. Some atoms are picky and only hold one or two hands. Carbon is the friendly extrovert of the bunch — it has exactly four hands to hold, and it wants to use all of them.
