The shovel you left outside rusts and turns brownish red. The wood in your fireplace burns and turns into ashes. Chemists seek to understand these elements and the processes they undergo to create the world around us. Chemists analyze the nature of the elements we live with. Chemistry is the study of substances.
Chemists study the composition of substances, how the substances act, and how they change.
With this knowledge, they then try to determine why substances change and how they can be controlled. Chemistry is a science that borders physics, mathematics, biology, and health and environmental sciences, and chemists apply their analytical and critical thinking skills to problems in these and other areas. Everything is made up of chemical elements which are tiny bits of matter called atoms, and each element's atoms are unique. When atoms of different elements combine, they form molecules of a chemical compound, the properties of which can be entirely different from each element alone. For example, take common salt, a safe compound that we use to season our food.