Every living thing on Earth is built around a single element, and it isn’t there by accident — carbon has a chemical talent that no other element can match. This episode explains why life, from bacteria to blue whales, is carbon-based, and how the same versatile atom gives us both diamonds and the graphite in a pencil.

You’ll come away understanding what makes carbon uniquely able to build the molecules of life, why the same element can be diamond or soot, and how carbon links the living world, the air and the rocks together.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: Royal Society of Chemistry – “Carbon”; Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (the chapter “Carbon”); Nick Lane, Oxygen and related works.