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Depending on the type of artificial blood that is made, various raw materials are used. Hemoglobin-based products can use either isolated hemoglobin or synthetically produced hemoglobin.

To produce hemoglobin synthetically, manufacturers use compounds known as amino acids. These are chemicals that plants and animals use to create the proteins that are essential for life. There are 20 naturally occurring amino acids that may be used to produce hemoglobin. All of the amino acid molecules share certain chemical characteristics. They are made up of an amino group, a carboxyl group, and a side chain. The nature of the side chain differentiates the various amino acids. Hemoglobin synthesis also requires a specific type of bacteria and all of the materials needed to incubate it. This includes warm water, molasses, glucose, acetic acid, alcohols, urea, and liquid ammonia.

For other types of hemoglobin-based artificial blood products, the hemoglobin is isolated from human blood. It is typically obtained from donated blood that has expired before it is used. Other sources of hemoglobin come from spent animal blood. This hemoglobin is slightly different from human hemoglobin and must be modified before being used.

Meta released a massive trove of chemistry data Wednesday that it hopes will supercharge scientific research, and is also crucial for the development of more advanced, general-purpose AI systems.

The company used the data set to build a powerful new AI model for scientists that can speed up the time it takes to create new drugs and materials.

The Open Molecules 2025 effort required 6 billion compute hours to create, and is the result of 100 million calculations that simulate the quantum mechanics of atoms and molecules in four key areas chosen for their potential impact on science.

We know that all the other forces governed by quantum mechanics are transmitted by indivisible particles: photons for the electromagnetic force, which governs light and the basic chemistry of matter; gluons for the strong force, which sticks together protons and neutrons inside atoms; and W and Z bosons for the weak force, which enables certain particles to radioactively decay. If gravity has the same underlying theory as these forces, it should also be carried by its own particle: a graviton. Now researchers, including Claudia Du Rham at Imperial in London, are in the hunt for these mysterious and vanishingly weak particles.

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About New Scientist:
New Scientist was founded in 1956 for “all those interested in scientific discovery and its social consequences”. Today our website, videos, newsletters, app, podcast and print magazine cover the world’s most important, exciting and entertaining science news as well as asking the big-picture questions about life, the universe, and what it means to be human.

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https://www.newscientist.com/

The phenomenon of biological ultraweak photon emission (UPE), that is, extremely low-intensity emission (10 103 photons/cm2/sec) in the spectral range of 200 1,000 nm, has been observed in all living systems that have been examined. Here we report experiments that exemplify the ability of novel imaging systems to detect variations in UPE for a set of physiologically important scenarios. We use EMCCD and CCD cameras to capture single visible-wavelength photons with low noise and quantum efficiencies higher than 90%. Our investigation reveals significant contrast between the UPE from live vs. dead mice. In plants we observed that an increase in temperature and injuries both caused an increase in UPE intensity. Moreover, chemical treatments modified the UPE emission characteristics of plants, particularly the application of an anesthetic (benzocaine) to injury, which showed the highest emission among the compounds tested. As a result, UPE imaging provides the possibility of non-invasive label-free imaging of vitality in animals and the responses of plants to stress.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, UCSF and the University of Pittsburgh have developed a new workflow for designing enzymes from scratch, paving the way toward more efficient, powerful and environmentally benign chemistry. The new method allows designers to combine a variety of desirable properties into new-to-nature catalysts for an array of applications, from drug development to materials design.

This research is published in the journal Science, and is the result of a collaborative effort among the DeGrado lab at UCSF, the Yang lab at UCSB and the Liu lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

“If people could design very efficient enzymes from scratch, you could solve many important problems,” said UCSB chemistry professor Yang Yang, a senior author on the paper.

Sustainably produced, biodegradable materials are an important focus of modern materials science. However, when working with natural materials such as cellulose, lignin or chitin, researchers face a trade-off. Although these substances are biodegradable in their pure form, they are often not ideal when it comes to performance. Chemical processing steps can be used to make them stronger, more resistant or more supple—but in doing so, their sustainability is often compromised.

Empa researchers from the Cellulose and Wood Materials laboratory have now developed a bio-based material that cleverly avoids this compromise. Not only is it completely biodegradable, it is also tear-resistant and has versatile functional properties. All this takes place with minimal processing steps and without chemicals—you can even eat it. Its secret: It’s alive.

The study is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

In Biology 101, we learn that RNA is a single, ribbon-like strand of base pairs that is copied from our DNA and then read like a recipe to build a protein. But there’s more to the story. Some RNA strands fold into complex shapes that allow them to drive cellular processes like gene regulation and protein synthesis, or catalyze biochemical reactions.

We know that these active molecules, called non-coding RNAs, are present in all life forms, yet we’re just starting to understand their many roles—and how they can be harnessed for applications in environmental science, agriculture, and medicine.

To study—and potentially modify—the functions of non-coding RNAs, we need to determine their structure. Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a streamlined process that predicts the structure of an RNA molecule down to the atomic level.

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more . So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.