6 ms·

The paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868 The "soap and solvent" is sodium hydroxide (

The paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868 The "soap and solvent" is sodium hydroxide (lye) and DMSO at 120 degC. Those are... fairly... well behaved chemicals, but lye is stout stuff and DMSO attacks nitrile gloves. You could imagine a remediation process that uses this process but the combo ain't exactly Dawn dish soap. I'd almost prefer pyroprocessing over it.

chasil 4y ago
DMSO is not well-behaved. It easily penetrates human skin, and carries solutes with it. Don't touch! "DMSO can cause contaminants, toxins, and medicines to be absorbed through the skin, which may cause unexpected effects. "Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. Glove selection is important when working with DMSO. Butyl rubber, fluoroelastomer, neoprene, or thick (15 mil / 0.4 mm) latex gloves are recommended. Nitrile gloves, which are very commonly used in chemical laboratories, may protect from brief contact but have been found to degrade rapidly with exposure to DMSO." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide
- biotinker 4y ago
  That's true, but in and of itself, it's less toxic to humans than ethanol is. It degrades in the environment quite readily, as well. If we were looking for a chemical to deploy at scale to clean up PFAS in existing environments, we could do much worse.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    It’s a carrier. It introduces whatever is in it to your bloodstream.
    - nfhshy68 4y ago
      Does it release it?
      - feet 4y ago
        What else would happen to it?
        nfhshy68 4y ago
        I dunno.. that's why I'm asking.
        feet 4y ago
        From my understanding, when a solution like DMSO with PFAS enters our blood stream it gets highly dilute. Solvation binding of solvent (DMSO) and the solute (PFAS) now has to compete with binding from all sorts of other proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc. In this incredibly dilute state, the previous mixture of molecules now spreads out and gets taken up by different tissues. The tissues that take up the compounds depends in the molecular properties of the compound in question, so something like PFAS which are highly lipophilic (iirc) meaning fat soluble, they will be taken up by cells pretty readily as they can easily cross the lipid bilayer membrane but will be stored in adipose tissue and continue impacting those cells and possibly be slowly released over time to impact the organism systemically. This of course will depend on initial dose concentration, duration of exposure, adioposity of the organism, along with a multitude of other factors. The study of how compounds circulate in this way is a subfield of pharmacology known as Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME)
    - 1_over_n 4y ago
      During my masters i used DMSO as a carrier for various lab experiments. The general consensus was to avoid skin contact with it.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        There are pharmaceutical preparations that use it to carry across the skin. Was thought for a while to have anti-inflammatory effects itself. Ethanol works as an absorption enhancer too.
      - giardini 4y ago
        This. I once had a long-running (weeks) experiment that used DMSO as a solvent. Early on it was realized that the DMSO was degrading all non-glass rubbers and plastics in the chemical "circuit", which began to sag like an old TinkerToy structure. Had to rebuild/rerun with parts that were resistant to DMSO.
    - xkcd-sucks 4y ago
      Have heard that many times, but in grad school it was determined orthogonally to any funded/published project, with n>3 subjects of various skin phenotypes, that many super-potent small molecule compounds were not active topically in DMSO even at 100-10000x doses regardless of polarity... Read between the lines of course. Would not trust safety to that observation with any non-fun chemicals but still. Unrelatedly, microwave assisted reactions in DMSO solvent wete found to have some totally gross failure modes that were a pain to clean up and got banned in the lab
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  To be fair to the op - in chemistry well behaved means - it is more stable than nitroglycerin, less reactive than fluorine and less toxic than dimethylmercury. Aka - won't kill you outright if you are just properly careful.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Sounds like how Australians supposedly call a box jellyfish sting “uncomfortable”
- loldk 4y ago
  [dead]
- chaxor 4y ago
  I think they meant well behaved in the sense that it isn't highly reactive - e.g. doesn't explode in contact with air. Not so much what it does to humans. We're talking about fluorine chemistry here, so things get kind of extreme.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    "Extreme" is when you have elemental fluorine. Vs. nice, stable fluorine compounds & salts. This situation involves only the latter.
    - sbierwagen 4y ago
      Well that's the problem, right? The more stable the substance you're trying to degrade, the more intense the conditions or chemicals you need. Teflon is inert as a rock, so if you for some reason needed to dissolve it in acid then you have to reach deep into the realm of impracticality and pull out demonic reagents like chlorine trifluoride or trihydridoboron.
Supermancho 4y ago
What I know about DMSO: DMSO is used in pain relief in other countries (eg Mexico). It's also excellent for burns as it allows the body to repair a tiny amount of nerve damage or prevents it. Hard to say. This is demonstrable by burning yourself, I guess. My family and I have used it for burns for over 20 years. Granted, we don't get burned/encounter people who have been burned at home that often. I had a close friend with a rare disease (McCune Albright's Syndrome) who used it for pain relief, after I treated a burn she received. It has been reported that it use has repaired massive nerve damage, which is probably coincidental. It is sold in healthfood stores in the US, but you want to dilute it 1/100 parts water. While it is primarily used as an industrial lubricant, on contact, it immediately travels through the skin to the nervous system. Most people get the strange reaction of the taste of oysters, when it's absorbed. There is a small percentage of people with various allergic reactions, like with many chemicals. I would never mix it with soap, for any reason. It's like mixing shoe polish or granola with soap, you just end up with a mess of concerns.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  A mixture of diclofenac and DMSO to treat pain can be bought OTC https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19380203/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19380203/ it was an expensive prescription med a few years back. I get dyspepsia from NSAIDs so I thought, "Could I make an ointment like that with ibuprofen?" and looked in the literature and found that ibuprofen is absorbed quickly with DMSO even more so than diclofenac. So I made a batch, but when I tried it I found I'd get dyspepsia very quickly after applying it to my skin so I guess the ibuprofen was being absorbed efficiently.
- flobosg 4y ago
  DMSO was purportedly involved in the case of the “Toxic Lady”[1], who apparently used it as a pain relief agent and ended up intoxicating the hospital workers assisting her. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gloria_Ramirez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gloria_Ramirez
  - overthemoon 4y ago
    This is wild. Interesting that her family denied the claim she was self-administering DMSO.
ngold 4y ago
We just need to boil the world's oceans now
- edgefield 4y ago
  Or fill the oceans with oil and set it on fire!
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    I always knew Pemex was a bastion of environmentalism. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fire-offshore-pemex-platform-gulf-mexico-under-control-2021-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fire-offshore-pemex-...
  - donquichotte 4y ago
    Ah yes, Ocean 2.0! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE7KcF3MphU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE7KcF3MphU
    - edgefield 4y ago
      Lol. Thanks for the laugh.
- selcuka 4y ago
  Or just wait and do nothing...
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Sun is gonna die eventually
    - worldshit 4y ago
      can't happen any sooner...
    - sitkack 4y ago
doodlebugging 4y ago
About 40 years ago I boarded my horse with an old cowboy who used DMSO as a horse liniment. He had been using it for years any time one of his mounts was worked pretty hard or when someone brought a lame horse to him. He would rub the joints, calves, and thighs of the horse down good with DMSO for a few days and then they were good to go again. He also used it on his wife. He told me that she had type I diabetes and neuropathy as a result. Her feet were always cold from poor circulation. That was true until he happened to rub her feet one day after treating a horse. Her feet warmed up in minutes and became normal pink again. After that, he used it on her feet and legs since it improved circulation. You can say what you will about it being reactive and possibly not good for you but she was able to dance again and get back on her horse so it definitely does have some benefit. They did this for at least 30 years and both of them were past 75 years old when they passed away. Like another poster said, it is used as a carrier for some medications since it pulls them straight into the bloodstream. I don't think it's magic but I also don't think you'll suffer much using it even with bare hands. As far as lye is concerned, the sodium hydroxide in this paper, you can easily make that yourself with wood ash and water. It is pretty handy if you are tanning hides since the treatment of a raw hide with lye causes the hair to slip right off leaving a smooth skin ready for the next step.
- Auracle 4y ago
  DMSO also makes your breath smell like garlic after you’ve had it on your skin. I wouldn’t want to be around a horse that’s had a healthy dose, and I certainly wouldn’t love if my wife had to use it every day.
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    Yeah, so I've heard. Life is full of trade-offs and if I knew that it would help my wife I'd rub that shit all over her and buy lots of Peppo-mint Life Savers so she never had to do without.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    To fix such a serious issue OP is mentioning for your life companion? WTF is wrong with people? If you are married and will stay together till end, worse things will come along from both sides. Will you just ignore her then or tell her to not ruin your day with her petty issues? Btw garlic consumption and subsequent breath is fairly common in many cultures for millennia due to its very positive health effects, just not among snobbish posh ones. There are plenty of solutions to bad odor, easiest being along the line of "if you can't beat them join them" - if you eat even just a bit of raw garlic, nobody smells bad to you anymore.
zoomablemind 4y ago
>...You could imagine a remediation process that uses this process but the combo ain't exactly Dawn dish soap. "...The relatively high freezing point of DMSO, 18.5 °C (65.3 °F), means that at, or just below, room temperature it is a solid." , per Wikipedia. I guess, it could be powdered before use. Though the whole application proposition hardly fits into a common household let alone kitchen.

chasil 4y ago

DMSO is not well-behaved. It easily penetrates human skin, and carries solutes with it. Don't touch! "DMSO can cause contaminants, toxins, and medicines to be absorbed through the skin, which may cause unexpected effects. "Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. Glove selection is important when working with DMSO. Butyl rubber, fluoroelastomer, neoprene, or thick (15 mil / 0.4 mm) latex gloves are recommended. Nitrile gloves, which are very commonly used in chemical laboratories, may protect from brief contact but have been found to degrade rapidly with exposure to DMSO." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide

biotinker 4y ago
That's true, but in and of itself, it's less toxic to humans than ethanol is. It degrades in the environment quite readily, as well. If we were looking for a chemical to deploy at scale to clean up PFAS in existing environments, we could do much worse.
- bergenty 4y ago
  It’s a carrier. It introduces whatever is in it to your bloodstream.
  - nfhshy68 4y ago
    Does it release it?
    - feet 4y ago
      What else would happen to it?
      - nfhshy68 4y ago
        I dunno.. that's why I'm asking.
        feet 4y ago
        From my understanding, when a solution like DMSO with PFAS enters our blood stream it gets highly dilute. Solvation binding of solvent (DMSO) and the solute (PFAS) now has to compete with binding from all sorts of other proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc. In this incredibly dilute state, the previous mixture of molecules now spreads out and gets taken up by different tissues. The tissues that take up the compounds depends in the molecular properties of the compound in question, so something like PFAS which are highly lipophilic (iirc) meaning fat soluble, they will be taken up by cells pretty readily as they can easily cross the lipid bilayer membrane but will be stored in adipose tissue and continue impacting those cells and possibly be slowly released over time to impact the organism systemically. This of course will depend on initial dose concentration, duration of exposure, adioposity of the organism, along with a multitude of other factors. The study of how compounds circulate in this way is a subfield of pharmacology known as Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME)
  - 1_over_n 4y ago
    During my masters i used DMSO as a carrier for various lab experiments. The general consensus was to avoid skin contact with it.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      There are pharmaceutical preparations that use it to carry across the skin. Was thought for a while to have anti-inflammatory effects itself. Ethanol works as an absorption enhancer too.
    - giardini 4y ago
      This. I once had a long-running (weeks) experiment that used DMSO as a solvent. Early on it was realized that the DMSO was degrading all non-glass rubbers and plastics in the chemical "circuit", which began to sag like an old TinkerToy structure. Had to rebuild/rerun with parts that were resistant to DMSO.
  - xkcd-sucks 4y ago
    Have heard that many times, but in grad school it was determined orthogonally to any funded/published project, with n>3 subjects of various skin phenotypes, that many super-potent small molecule compounds were not active topically in DMSO even at 100-10000x doses regardless of polarity... Read between the lines of course. Would not trust safety to that observation with any non-fun chemicals but still. Unrelatedly, microwave assisted reactions in DMSO solvent wete found to have some totally gross failure modes that were a pain to clean up and got banned in the lab
ReptileMan 4y ago
To be fair to the op - in chemistry well behaved means - it is more stable than nitroglycerin, less reactive than fluorine and less toxic than dimethylmercury. Aka - won't kill you outright if you are just properly careful.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Sounds like how Australians supposedly call a box jellyfish sting “uncomfortable”
loldk 4y ago
[dead]
chaxor 4y ago
I think they meant well behaved in the sense that it isn't highly reactive - e.g. doesn't explode in contact with air. Not so much what it does to humans. We're talking about fluorine chemistry here, so things get kind of extreme.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  "Extreme" is when you have elemental fluorine. Vs. nice, stable fluorine compounds & salts. This situation involves only the latter.
  - sbierwagen 4y ago
    Well that's the problem, right? The more stable the substance you're trying to degrade, the more intense the conditions or chemicals you need. Teflon is inert as a rock, so if you for some reason needed to dissolve it in acid then you have to reach deep into the realm of impracticality and pull out demonic reagents like chlorine trifluoride or trihydridoboron.

Supermancho 4y ago

What I know about DMSO: DMSO is used in pain relief in other countries (eg Mexico). It's also excellent for burns as it allows the body to repair a tiny amount of nerve damage or prevents it. Hard to say. This is demonstrable by burning yourself, I guess. My family and I have used it for burns for over 20 years. Granted, we don't get burned/encounter people who have been burned at home that often. I had a close friend with a rare disease (McCune Albright's Syndrome) who used it for pain relief, after I treated a burn she received. It has been reported that it use has repaired massive nerve damage, which is probably coincidental. It is sold in healthfood stores in the US, but you want to dilute it 1/100 parts water. While it is primarily used as an industrial lubricant, on contact, it immediately travels through the skin to the nervous system. Most people get the strange reaction of the taste of oysters, when it's absorbed. There is a small percentage of people with various allergic reactions, like with many chemicals. I would never mix it with soap, for any reason. It's like mixing shoe polish or granola with soap, you just end up with a mess of concerns.

PaulHoule 4y ago
A mixture of diclofenac and DMSO to treat pain can be bought OTC https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19380203/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19380203/ it was an expensive prescription med a few years back. I get dyspepsia from NSAIDs so I thought, "Could I make an ointment like that with ibuprofen?" and looked in the literature and found that ibuprofen is absorbed quickly with DMSO even more so than diclofenac. So I made a batch, but when I tried it I found I'd get dyspepsia very quickly after applying it to my skin so I guess the ibuprofen was being absorbed efficiently.
flobosg 4y ago
DMSO was purportedly involved in the case of the “Toxic Lady”[1], who apparently used it as a pain relief agent and ended up intoxicating the hospital workers assisting her. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gloria_Ramirez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gloria_Ramirez
- overthemoon 4y ago
  This is wild. Interesting that her family denied the claim she was self-administering DMSO.

ngold 4y ago

We just need to boil the world's oceans now

edgefield 4y ago
Or fill the oceans with oil and set it on fire!
- arcticbull 4y ago
  I always knew Pemex was a bastion of environmentalism. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fire-offshore-pemex-platform-gulf-mexico-under-control-2021-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fire-offshore-pemex-...
- donquichotte 4y ago
  Ah yes, Ocean 2.0! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE7KcF3MphU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE7KcF3MphU
  - edgefield 4y ago
    Lol. Thanks for the laugh.
selcuka 4y ago
Or just wait and do nothing...
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Sun is gonna die eventually
  - worldshit 4y ago
    can't happen any sooner...
  - sitkack 4y ago

doodlebugging 4y ago

About 40 years ago I boarded my horse with an old cowboy who used DMSO as a horse liniment. He had been using it for years any time one of his mounts was worked pretty hard or when someone brought a lame horse to him. He would rub the joints, calves, and thighs of the horse down good with DMSO for a few days and then they were good to go again. He also used it on his wife. He told me that she had type I diabetes and neuropathy as a result. Her feet were always cold from poor circulation. That was true until he happened to rub her feet one day after treating a horse. Her feet warmed up in minutes and became normal pink again. After that, he used it on her feet and legs since it improved circulation. You can say what you will about it being reactive and possibly not good for you but she was able to dance again and get back on her horse so it definitely does have some benefit. They did this for at least 30 years and both of them were past 75 years old when they passed away. Like another poster said, it is used as a carrier for some medications since it pulls them straight into the bloodstream. I don't think it's magic but I also don't think you'll suffer much using it even with bare hands. As far as lye is concerned, the sodium hydroxide in this paper, you can easily make that yourself with wood ash and water. It is pretty handy if you are tanning hides since the treatment of a raw hide with lye causes the hair to slip right off leaving a smooth skin ready for the next step.

Auracle 4y ago
DMSO also makes your breath smell like garlic after you’ve had it on your skin. I wouldn’t want to be around a horse that’s had a healthy dose, and I certainly wouldn’t love if my wife had to use it every day.
- doodlebugging 4y ago
  Yeah, so I've heard. Life is full of trade-offs and if I knew that it would help my wife I'd rub that shit all over her and buy lots of Peppo-mint Life Savers so she never had to do without.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  To fix such a serious issue OP is mentioning for your life companion? WTF is wrong with people? If you are married and will stay together till end, worse things will come along from both sides. Will you just ignore her then or tell her to not ruin your day with her petty issues? Btw garlic consumption and subsequent breath is fairly common in many cultures for millennia due to its very positive health effects, just not among snobbish posh ones. There are plenty of solutions to bad odor, easiest being along the line of "if you can't beat them join them" - if you eat even just a bit of raw garlic, nobody smells bad to you anymore.

zoomablemind 4y ago

>...You could imagine a remediation process that uses this process but the combo ain't exactly Dawn dish soap. "...The relatively high freezing point of DMSO, 18.5 °C (65.3 °F), means that at, or just below, room temperature it is a solid." , per Wikipedia. I guess, it could be powdered before use. Though the whole application proposition hardly fits into a common household let alone kitchen.