The “lead” of a pencil is actually made of a substance called graphite which is made of carbon atoms. The picture shows a close-up of one carbon atom. A hydrogen atom has one proton as the nucleus and ...

Carbon dioxide is made up of one carbon atom covalently bonded to two oxygen atoms. Although electrons are shared, they are not shared equally between the carbon and the oxygen atoms. The oxygen atom ...

But what makes up a carbon atom—or any other atom? The first subatomic particle to be identified was the electron, in 1898. Ten years later, the British physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered ...

But what is it really but a collection of ordinary carbon atoms—the same kind of atom that makes up 18 percent of your body and is an essential ingredient of all living things? This Hot Science ...

In these drawings, every line is a bond and every bend is a carbon atom. Most hydrogen atoms are not shown, and it is assumed each carbon has enough hydrogens so that each carbon has four bonds.