Where would carbon-based life be without carbon? There are 118 known chemical elements, but carbon is the fourth most abundant and perhaps the most important to human life. Everywhere you look, ...

Chemist and writer Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table—a memoir in the form of short stories about elements—closes with a chapter called “Carbon,” which tracks a single atom through time and space.

Carbon, the building block of life, is thought to have formed mainly inside the cores of stars. But a new experiment is testing another idea: some of it may have been forged during supernova blasts or ...