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 ...

Plutonium has captured the attention of scientists since its discovery in the early 1940s. This enigmatic element has an important role to play in emerging energy technologies like nuclear batteries ...

A research team from Hokkaido University has confirmed a century-old theory by discovering a stable single-electron covalent bond, known as a sigma bond, between two carbon atoms. This unique bond ...

The molecules were deemed too unstable to make, but experiments show they can be ‘captured’ in certain reactions to yield useful products. For the first time, chemists have made a class of molecules ...