5 ms·

Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems

192 points by PaulHoule 11mo ago

chrisweekly 11mo ago
This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins, preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...
- buildsjets 11mo ago
  Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.
  - zdragnar 11mo ago
    Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the article: > The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.
    - MangoToupe 11mo ago
      > From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. "Cleaning" soil is an interesting concept. At what point does it just become dirt? Presumably some of the nutrients will remain, but it seems like this would sterilize it. Dirt still has use, of course, but soil is expensive to produce for a reason.
      - zdragnar 11mo ago
        Well, cleaning in this case would be removing the remaining DMSO, which is probably not too desirable to have in your soil. Considering the existing DDT contamination, ending up with dirt that needs to be fortified with compost is hardly the worst trade-off.
        MangoToupe 11mo ago
        > Considering the existing DDT contamination, ending up with dirt that needs to be fortified with compost is hardly the worst trade-off. I would definitely bet against this if I could. Soil is far more potent than DDT can harm.
        zdragnar 11mo ago
        I don't think anyone is really too concerned about DDT harming the soil itself. DDT, like organic mercury compounds, bioaccumulates up the food chain. Contaminated soil is sequestered to prevent it from contaminating insects and animals and then humans. Hence, the trade-off: DDT in the ecosystem, or killing soil and rebuilding it with compost and time.
        MangoToupe 11mo ago
        You shouldn't call it "soil" after treating it like this. Maybe "processed earth" or something like that
    - modo_mario 11mo ago
      This all sounds like it would be many manyfold more expensive than just digging it all up, gathering it all togheter and putting it into some quarry or so that doesn't let much if any seepage happen.
      - zdragnar 11mo ago
        I don't think it is intended to be commercially viable on the basis of benzene production alone. Rather, it is a more permanent solution compared to sequestration, where the benzene production offsets the cost. If, as they plan, it can be done on-site, that would also eliminate transporting the soil and avoiding accidentally spreading it elsewhere, which is appealing as well. Sanitary landfills (the sort that prevent seepage) are not exactly cheap either, and pose an ongoing risk in that the DDT is always there, waiting to get back out.
- guenthert 11mo ago
  Render me surprised as there is no Na in DDT.
CheeseFromLidl 11mo ago
How does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?
- awakeasleep 11mo ago
  I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.
  - CheeseFromLidl 11mo ago
    a process that can be used *on site* to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the *remediation of contaminated sites*
- coryrc 11mo ago
  Today we scrape however many meters deep of soil and haul off to a landfill. I assume you'd scrape it up, run it through something to pull out everything bigger than a pebble. Wash the pebbles, the rinse water goes with the soil through the cleaning process. Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
  - worthless-trash 11mo ago
    I guess it'd be a good time to add some bacteria and life back into the soil that in a controlled manner.
- talkingtab 11mo ago
  The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?
- 11mo ago
philipkglass 11mo ago
This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024 and 2021. Here are the relevant articles: "SCS Foundation News and Announcements 2025" https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_885 https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_... Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) – a known human carcinogen – a specific isomer of which was used as the insecticide Lindane. ... In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application. Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the earlier 2021 publication: "Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible vicinal dihalogenations" https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organic-chemistry/morandi-group-dam/documents/erc/ERCscience.pdf https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
DDT is still sprayed today, indoors, in Africa and Asia to control for mosquitos, including in India. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519625001615 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
- user_7832 11mo ago
  As an Indian... I had no idea. I've seen fumigation a lot right from childhood (kids used to run after the fumigation man to inhale that fog), with that sweetish smell it had. Of course it's possible it was pyrethroids... not like they don't cause allergic reactions either haha welp
- frontfor 11mo ago
  To clarify, it's not "Africa and Asia". Only India, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are still using DDT actively.
  - throwaway290 11mo ago
    The paper says a bunch of countries don't use DDT for malaria control but it doesn't say if they still use DDT in agriculture. They used to use it for pest control growing coffee
- marsven_422 11mo ago
  The DDT scare was a hoax
  - CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
    Funny, the bald eagle populations beg to differ and there is a whole other group of people who say polio was a hoax driven by DDT (both sides are probably crazy)
hosh 11mo ago
Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water without the use of electrolysis, or other energy inputs. He was able to decontaminate one of the top superfund sites. The method is broadly versatile, and requires even lower tech than electrolysis. His methods can also sequester heavy metals. It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant. More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > Dr John Todd …who is this? This guy [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hosh 11mo ago
    That is the dude.
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  >Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water ... It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant. So... he invented the ocean?
  - hosh 11mo ago
    Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast library for transforming molecules from one to another, and therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down pollutants. In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems that normally don’t mix so that some kind of novel, self-organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant. Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people can use much simpler, non-industrial tests — using samples from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by people who don’t have access to labs, but still need a way to test their water. A much simpler version of this that follows the same design principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary black water.
metalman 11mo ago
short, sweet, got the zam. for toxic waste sites (superfund), and land fills this checks all the boxes. Given that many of the older developed areas that have contaminated sites are also building out solar power, and pushing electricity prices into the negative, I believe that this could be set up to run full tilt, when power was cheap, and idle when it is expensive.
buildsjets 11mo ago
Wait up. They propose to convert DDT trapped in the soil to benzene trapped in the soil? Is not benzene also a toxic and persistent soil pollutant (it is) where the typical remediation is to excavate the bad soil and landfill it? (it is) https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/docs/coc_benzene.pdf https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/do... There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, she didn’t know why.
- jjk166 11mo ago
  They're not leaving it in the soil. The benzene is extracted as a useful byproduct.
  - buildsjets 11mo ago
    Yes, they are leaving it in the soil. Prove me wrong with data. It says nothing at all about extracting the waste benzene they created from the soil, neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. The paper specifically describes an in-situ process. If it were economically beneficial to extract benzene from contaminated soil for industrial use, we would already be doing that with the tens of thousands of existing benzene contaminated sites, not creating more of them.
    - irjustin 11mo ago
      > neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. I'm having trouble finding the paper, can you link please?
      - buildsjets 11mo ago
        Courtesy of another poster down-thread. https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organic-chemistry/morandi-group-dam/documents/erc/ERCscience.pdf https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
        11mo ago
ggm 11mo ago
Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty, and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for a well understood DMSO handling problem.
- buildsjets 11mo ago
  DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see. https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics I’m not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try it and see.
  - PaulHoule 11mo ago
    Back when diclofenac + dmso was rx-only and crazy expensive I tried making my own formulation with ibuprofen and dmso for back pain hoping it wouldn’t tweak out my stomach. According to what I read, ibuprofen would be very well absorbed with dmso. After applying the ointment I got an upset stomach in minutes so yeah…. It was well absorbed. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/ https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac-gel https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac...
  - tingletech 11mo ago
    When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab. You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.
amkharg26 11mo ago
PFAS contamination is one of those problems that seems insurmountable given how persistent these chemicals are. The fact that electrolysis can break down the carbon-fluorine bonds is genuinely exciting. What's particularly interesting is the potential for on-site remediation. Traditional methods often involve excavating contaminated soil or pumping and treating groundwater indefinitely. If this can be scaled cost-effectively, it could transform cleanup efforts at industrial sites and military bases. The key question is economic viability at scale. Energy costs for electrolysis can be significant, and PFAS contamination is often widespread. Would be curious to see lifecycle analysis comparing this to current remediation methods.
- istjohn 11mo ago
  This does not treat PFAS.
kawfey 11mo ago
Before reading the article, I guessed the headline was alluding to the popularity of Hypochlorus Acid as a sanitizer, made from electrolysis of slightly acidic salty (NaCl) water. I had a kid and the algorithm led me to discovering a brand of in-home electrolysis generators, and after a fair bit of research on safety and efficacy I’ve been using it quite a bit. Technically it solves contamination problems too.
krbaccord94f 11mo ago
Key point is this shift, which takes place from ideology to institutions. Ele-ctrolysis is the procedure of isolating ions from substrate. Running electrical current in water, which tends to separate the molecules as the inverse, being the addition of O2 to H20 in creating the peroxide or H2O2 distillation.

192 points by PaulHoule 11mo ago

This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins, preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...

buildsjets 11mo ago
Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.
- zdragnar 11mo ago
  Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the article: > The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.
  - MangoToupe 11mo ago
    > From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. "Cleaning" soil is an interesting concept. At what point does it just become dirt? Presumably some of the nutrients will remain, but it seems like this would sterilize it. Dirt still has use, of course, but soil is expensive to produce for a reason.
    - zdragnar 11mo ago
      Well, cleaning in this case would be removing the remaining DMSO, which is probably not too desirable to have in your soil. Considering the existing DDT contamination, ending up with dirt that needs to be fortified with compost is hardly the worst trade-off.
      - MangoToupe 11mo ago
        > Considering the existing DDT contamination, ending up with dirt that needs to be fortified with compost is hardly the worst trade-off. I would definitely bet against this if I could. Soil is far more potent than DDT can harm.
        zdragnar 11mo ago
        I don't think anyone is really too concerned about DDT harming the soil itself. DDT, like organic mercury compounds, bioaccumulates up the food chain. Contaminated soil is sequestered to prevent it from contaminating insects and animals and then humans. Hence, the trade-off: DDT in the ecosystem, or killing soil and rebuilding it with compost and time.
        MangoToupe 11mo ago
        You shouldn't call it "soil" after treating it like this. Maybe "processed earth" or something like that
  - modo_mario 11mo ago
    This all sounds like it would be many manyfold more expensive than just digging it all up, gathering it all togheter and putting it into some quarry or so that doesn't let much if any seepage happen.
    - zdragnar 11mo ago
      I don't think it is intended to be commercially viable on the basis of benzene production alone. Rather, it is a more permanent solution compared to sequestration, where the benzene production offsets the cost. If, as they plan, it can be done on-site, that would also eliminate transporting the soil and avoiding accidentally spreading it elsewhere, which is appealing as well. Sanitary landfills (the sort that prevent seepage) are not exactly cheap either, and pose an ongoing risk in that the DDT is always there, waiting to get back out.
guenthert 11mo ago
Render me surprised as there is no Na in DDT.

CheeseFromLidl 11mo ago

How does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?

awakeasleep 11mo ago
I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.
- CheeseFromLidl 11mo ago
  a process that can be used *on site* to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the *remediation of contaminated sites*
coryrc 11mo ago
Today we scrape however many meters deep of soil and haul off to a landfill. I assume you'd scrape it up, run it through something to pull out everything bigger than a pebble. Wash the pebbles, the rinse water goes with the soil through the cleaning process. Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
- worthless-trash 11mo ago
  I guess it'd be a good time to add some bacteria and life back into the soil that in a controlled manner.
talkingtab 11mo ago
The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?
11mo ago

philipkglass 11mo ago

This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024 and 2021. Here are the relevant articles: "SCS Foundation News and Announcements 2025" https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_885 https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_... Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) – a known human carcinogen – a specific isomer of which was used as the insecticide Lindane. ... In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application. Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the earlier 2021 publication: "Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible vicinal dihalogenations" https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organic-chemistry/morandi-group-dam/documents/erc/ERCscience.pdf https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...

CGMthrowaway 11mo ago

DDT is still sprayed today, indoors, in Africa and Asia to control for mosquitos, including in India. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519625001615 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...

user_7832 11mo ago
As an Indian... I had no idea. I've seen fumigation a lot right from childhood (kids used to run after the fumigation man to inhale that fog), with that sweetish smell it had. Of course it's possible it was pyrethroids... not like they don't cause allergic reactions either haha welp
frontfor 11mo ago
To clarify, it's not "Africa and Asia". Only India, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are still using DDT actively.
- throwaway290 11mo ago
  The paper says a bunch of countries don't use DDT for malaria control but it doesn't say if they still use DDT in agriculture. They used to use it for pest control growing coffee
marsven_422 11mo ago
The DDT scare was a hoax
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  Funny, the bald eagle populations beg to differ and there is a whole other group of people who say polio was a hoax driven by DDT (both sides are probably crazy)

hosh 11mo ago

Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water without the use of electrolysis, or other energy inputs. He was able to decontaminate one of the top superfund sites. The method is broadly versatile, and requires even lower tech than electrolysis. His methods can also sequester heavy metals. It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant. More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> Dr John Todd …who is this? This guy [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- hosh 11mo ago
  That is the dude.
CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
>Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water ... It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant. So... he invented the ocean?
- hosh 11mo ago
  Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast library for transforming molecules from one to another, and therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down pollutants. In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems that normally don’t mix so that some kind of novel, self-organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant. Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people can use much simpler, non-industrial tests — using samples from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by people who don’t have access to labs, but still need a way to test their water. A much simpler version of this that follows the same design principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary black water.

metalman 11mo ago

short, sweet, got the zam. for toxic waste sites (superfund), and land fills this checks all the boxes. Given that many of the older developed areas that have contaminated sites are also building out solar power, and pushing electricity prices into the negative, I believe that this could be set up to run full tilt, when power was cheap, and idle when it is expensive.

buildsjets 11mo ago

Wait up. They propose to convert DDT trapped in the soil to benzene trapped in the soil? Is not benzene also a toxic and persistent soil pollutant (it is) where the typical remediation is to excavate the bad soil and landfill it? (it is) https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/docs/coc_benzene.pdf https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/do... There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, she didn’t know why.

jjk166 11mo ago
They're not leaving it in the soil. The benzene is extracted as a useful byproduct.
- buildsjets 11mo ago
  Yes, they are leaving it in the soil. Prove me wrong with data. It says nothing at all about extracting the waste benzene they created from the soil, neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. The paper specifically describes an in-situ process. If it were economically beneficial to extract benzene from contaminated soil for industrial use, we would already be doing that with the tens of thousands of existing benzene contaminated sites, not creating more of them.
  - irjustin 11mo ago
    > neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. I'm having trouble finding the paper, can you link please?
    - buildsjets 11mo ago
      Courtesy of another poster down-thread. https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organic-chemistry/morandi-group-dam/documents/erc/ERCscience.pdf https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
      - 11mo ago

ggm 11mo ago

Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty, and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for a well understood DMSO handling problem.

buildsjets 11mo ago
DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see. https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics I’m not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try it and see.
- PaulHoule 11mo ago
  Back when diclofenac + dmso was rx-only and crazy expensive I tried making my own formulation with ibuprofen and dmso for back pain hoping it wouldn’t tweak out my stomach. According to what I read, ibuprofen would be very well absorbed with dmso. After applying the ointment I got an upset stomach in minutes so yeah…. It was well absorbed. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/ https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac-gel https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac...
- tingletech 11mo ago
  When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab. You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.

amkharg26 11mo ago

PFAS contamination is one of those problems that seems insurmountable given how persistent these chemicals are. The fact that electrolysis can break down the carbon-fluorine bonds is genuinely exciting. What's particularly interesting is the potential for on-site remediation. Traditional methods often involve excavating contaminated soil or pumping and treating groundwater indefinitely. If this can be scaled cost-effectively, it could transform cleanup efforts at industrial sites and military bases. The key question is economic viability at scale. Energy costs for electrolysis can be significant, and PFAS contamination is often widespread. Would be curious to see lifecycle analysis comparing this to current remediation methods.

istjohn 11mo ago
This does not treat PFAS.

kawfey 11mo ago

Before reading the article, I guessed the headline was alluding to the popularity of Hypochlorus Acid as a sanitizer, made from electrolysis of slightly acidic salty (NaCl) water. I had a kid and the algorithm led me to discovering a brand of in-home electrolysis generators, and after a fair bit of research on safety and efficacy I’ve been using it quite a bit. Technically it solves contamination problems too.

krbaccord94f 11mo ago

Key point is this shift, which takes place from ideology to institutions. Ele-ctrolysis is the procedure of isolating ions from substrate. Running electrical current in water, which tends to separate the molecules as the inverse, being the addition of O2 to H20 in creating the peroxide or H2O2 distillation.