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Liquid is one of the four primary states of matter, with the others being solid, gas and plasma. A liquid is a fluid. Unlike a solid, the molecules in a liquid have a much greater freedom to move. The forces that bind the molecules together in a solid are only temporary in a liquid, allowing a liquid to flow while a solid remains rigid.
Blood is a complex liquid. Blood is composed of plasma and formed elements. The plasma contains 91.5% water, 7% proteins and 1.5% other solutes. The formed elements are platelets, white blood cells, and red blood cells. The presence of these formed elements and their interaction with plasma molecules are the main reasons why blood differs so ...
In this state the molecules flow as in a liquid, but they all point in the same direction (within each domain) and cannot rotate freely. Like a crystalline solid, but unlike a liquid, liquid crystals react to polarized light. Other types of liquid crystals are described in the main article on these states.
Carbon monoxide, for example, is extremely dangerous when carried to the blood via the lungs by inhalation, because carbon monoxide irreversibly binds to hemoglobin to form carboxyhemoglobin, so that less hemoglobin is free to bind oxygen, and fewer oxygen molecules can be transported throughout the blood. This can cause suffocation insidiously.
One of the main roles of extracellular fluid is to facilitate the exchange of molecular oxygen from blood to tissue cells and for carbon dioxide, CO 2, produced in cell mitochondria, back to the blood. Since carbon dioxide is about 20 times more soluble in water than oxygen, it can relatively easily diffuse in the aqueous fluid between cells ...
The polarity is due to the electronegativity of the atom of oxygen: oxygen is more electronegative than the atoms of hydrogen, so the electrons they share through the covalent bonds are more often close to oxygen rather than hydrogen. These are called polar covalent bonds, covalent bonds between atoms that thus become oppositely charged. [1]
About 98.5% of the oxygen in a sample of arterial blood in a healthy human, breathing air at sea-level pressure, is chemically combined with hemoglobin molecules. About 1.5% is physically dissolved in the other blood liquids and not connected to hemoglobin. The hemoglobin molecule is the primary transporter of oxygen in vertebrates.
First, molecules that diffuse are going to travel a short distance thanks to the capillary wall, the small diameter and the close proximity to each cell having a capillary. The short distance is important because the capillary diffusion rate decreases when the diffusion distance increases.