Carbon

Carbon (from Latin: carbo "coal") is a chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6. On the periodic table, it is the first (row 2) of six elements in column (group) 14, which have in common the composition of their outer electron shell. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent—making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. There are three naturally occurring isotopes, with ¹²C and ¹³C being stable, while ¹⁴C is radioactive, decaying with a half-life of about 5,730 years. Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity.

Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all forms of carbon-based life, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen. This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life.

Carbon (journal)

Carbon is a scientific journal published by Elsevier. According to the journal's website, "Carbon publishes papers that deal with original research on carbonaceous solids with an emphasis on graphene-based materials. These materials include, but are not limited to, carbon nanotubes, carbon fibers and filaments, graphites, activated carbons, pyrolytic carbons, glass-like carbons, carbon blacks, and chars."

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Carbon (API)

Carbon is one of Apple Inc.'s C-based application programming interfaces (APIs) for the Macintosh operating system. Carbon provided a good degree of backward compatibility for programs that ran on the now-obsolete Mac OS 8 and 9. Developers could use the Carbon APIs to port their "classic" Mac software to the Mac OS X platform with far less effort than a port to the entirely different Cocoa system, which originated in OPENSTEP.

Carbon was an important part of Apple's strategy for bringing Mac OS X to market, offering a path for quick porting of existing software applications, as well as a means of shipping applications that would run on either OS X or the Classic Mac OS. As the market has increasingly moved to the Cocoa-based frameworks, especially after the release of iOS, the need for a porting library was diluted. Apple did not create a 64-bit version of Carbon while updating their other frameworks in the 2007 time-frame, and eventually deprecated the entire API in OS X 10.8, which was released on July 24, 2012.