What Is Actually Going On When A Substance Is Dissolved

What substances dissolve in blood eventually?

The main functions of blood is actually to transport dissolved substances, like hormones, around the body.The Plasma itself contains dissolved substances. Most of these are useful and are carried to places where they are to be stored or processed. The products of digestion including glucose, amino acids, mineral salts and vitamins are carried from the small intestines (ileum) to other organs. Glucose is either stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen or used in tissue respiration. Amino acids are used by all your tissues for growth and repair. The liver is able to remove excess amino acids from blood plasma and add some of those which are needed. The nitrogen from excess amino acids is turned into a harmful substance called urea.Vitamins are carried by plasma from the ileum to all other parts of the body. They help keep your tissues healthy. Minerals are also absorbed into blood plasma in the ileum and carried around the body. Different minerals are required for different reasons. You must know that calcium is needed for teeth and bones. It is also required for muscles. Calcium ions are involved in the chemical mechanisms of muscle contractions. So without enough calcium in your diet, your muscles are not able to contract correctly.Iodine is required by the thyroid gland in your neck to make a hormone called thyroxine. This controls how fast your body works. In particular, thyroxine affects the rate of tissue respiration. Hormones are secreted by endocrine glands and carried in blood plasma to target organs. Insulin is secreted by endocrine glands called “islets of Langerhans”. These are small groups of cells in your pancreas. The main target organ for insulin is the liver. Insulin stimulates the liver to convert excess glucose in your blood into glycogen. Insulin is also necessary for tissue respiration.The main baddies in your blood are urea and hydrogen carbonate ions. Urea is the product of excess amino acids. It is put into blood plasma by the liver and removed by the kidney. This process is called excretion. Your kidneys also excrete excess water and salts from your body. This process is called “osmoregulation”. It is under the control of the brain and involves chemical messengers ( hormones) secreted by the pituitary gland.Hydrogen carbonate ions are produced when carbon dioxide produced by tissue respiration is absorbed by blood plasma. In your lungs, hydrogen carbonate ions turn back to carbon dioxide which is excreted when you exhale.

What happens when a substance dissolves?

the process of dissolving:You probably remember that a water molecule is very small, with a single Oxygen and two Hydrogens.  The electrons of Hydrogen are pulled towards the Oxygen, making the two Hydrogen atoms more positive and the Oxygen more negative. (This attraction iis called a Hydrogen Bond.) So the whole molecule has a set of charges. These charges help keep one water molecule attracted to another.  The same charges mean that they can be very attracted to some substances when they are places in water. A tug of war often starts.Let’s use the common table salt sodium chloride (NaCl) as an example. NaCl is a compound made of one sodium ion (Na+) and one chloride ion (Cl-) held together by an ionic bond resulting from the attraction between positive and negative ions. Several NaCl molecules bond together to form salt crystals. Salt dissolves in water because water molecules have one negative end and one positive end.  See the modelhttp://mw2.concord.org/public/st...(An applet in browser) andhttp://mw2.concord.org/public/st...l. When NaCl is mixed with water, the strong polar ends of the water molecules attract the positive sodium ions and the negative chloride ions, pulling them apart.  Each ion becomes surrounded by water molecules attracted to it. This is why the salt seems to vanish in the water. The sodium chloride molecules have been split into ions, or dissolved, by the water molecules. Salt and other substances that dissolve in water are said to be “water soluble.”IN SIMPLER WORDSDissolving is when the solute breaks up from a larger crystal of molecules into much smaller groups or individual molecules. This break up is caused by coming into contact with the solvent. In the case of salt water, the water molecules break off salt molecules from the larger crystal lattice. They do this by pulling away the ions and then surrounding the salt molecules. Each salt molecule still exists. It is just now surrounded by water molecules instead of fixed to a crystal of salt.Read more at: http://www.ducksters.com/science...Light covalent compounds like tetrachloromethane and some light hydrocarbons can also dissolve the heavier covalent molecules by the same process of breaking up their molecules and bonding covalently with the smaller molecules, altering their physical properties.

Why don’t non-polar substances dissolve in polar solvents?

To dissolve in a polar (water based) substance, a molecule must interact with water either though ionic or hydrogen bonding. A non-polar molecule is one that does not interact with water. As an example, consider a fatty acid molecule.[1] Notice all those C-H bonds. Those bonds are so stable that they can not interact with any other molecule. Thus they will be excluded from a polar based environment. The cell utilizes this property to create membranes.Footnotes[1] Image on googleapis.com