Standard atomic weight real life substances—for example, in pharmaceuticals and scientific research. Atomic weights are specific to single sources and samples of an element, such as the atomic weight of carbon in a particular bone from a particular archeological site. Standard atomic weight generalizes such values to the "range of atomic weights" which a chemist might expect to derive from many random samples from Earth. This range is the cause of the "interval notation" in some standard atomic weight values. Out of the 118 known chemical elements, 84 are stable and have this Earth-environment based value. Typically, such a value is, for example
Atomic mass or standard atomic weight, by several mass units. Atomic masses expressed in unified atomic mass units (i.e. relative isotopic masses) are always close to whole-number values, but never (except in the case of carbon-12) exactly a whole number, for two reasons: The ratio of atomic mass to mass number (number of nucleons) varies from about 0.99884 for Fe to 1.00782505 for H. Any mass defect due to nuclear binding energy is experimentally a small fraction (less than 1%) of the mass of equal number of free nucleons. When compared to the average mass per nucleon in carbon-12, which is moderately