Tootfinder

Excelsior Sciences, which aims to use AI and robots for small-molecule drug discovery and development, raised a $70M Series A from Khosla Ventures and others (Aayushi Pratap/Chemical & Engineering News)
https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry

New York AI chemistry start-up raises $95 million 
Excelsior Sciences cofounders say the company will make new molecules using robots and artificial intelligence

Investigating the Sulfur Mystery in Protoplanetary Disks Through Chemical Modeling
Becky J. Williams, L. Ilsedore Cleeves, Rachel E. Gross, Jackson Baker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02176

Investigating the Sulfur Mystery in Protoplanetary Disks Through Chemical Modeling
Sulfur is a critical element to life on Earth, and with detections of sulfur-bearing molecules in exoplanets and comets, questions arise as to how sulfur is incorporated into planets in the first place. In order to understand sulfur's journey from molecular clouds to planets, we need to understand the molecular forms that sulfur takes in protoplanetary disks, where the rotational emission from sulfur-bearing molecules in the gas phase indicates a very low abundance. To address this question, we…

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) abundances in the disk around T Chamaeleontis (T Cha): PAH sizes, ionization fraction, and mass during JWST observations
Rahul Bandyopadhyay (Departamento de Astronom\'ia, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons), Simon Casassus (Departamento de Astronom\'ia, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, Data Observatory Foundation, Santiago, Chile)

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) abundances in the disk around T Chamaeleontis (T Cha): PAH sizes, ionization fraction, and mass during JWST observations
The T Tauri star T Cha is known to have a protoplanetary disk with a dust gap separating the inner and outer disk regions. The mid-IR JWST spectrum of T Cha show multiple prominent aromatic infrared bands (AIBs) around 6.2, 8.1, and 11.3 $μ$m. AIBs are commonly accepted as the emission stemming from PAH molecules. We aim to characterize the PAHs giving rise to the AIBs observed in the JWST spectrum of T Cha. Our objective is to estimate the PAH abundances, in terms of their sizes, ionization f…