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

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)

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.

So, you’re essentially washing the soil in DMSO, and DDT is more soluble in DMSO? — curious, what does it take to wash all that soil?

DMSO is a pretty common solvent. It's still nasty stuff, but easy to clean from a sample.

Take a bunch of contaminated soil, wash with DMSO, filter out soil, wash again, take all of that and electrolyze it.

Take the soil, dilute with lots of water and boil in a chamber with a fractionating column / distillation setup to reclaim the last of the DMSO.

I'd be surprised if this was in any way economical, but it's the cheapest way to permanently get rid of DDT, and the production of benzene and other hydrocarbons is a nice side benefit to reclaim some of the cost.

>Why am I thinking scam?

It seems scam adjacent because a high proportion of other stuff written in the same tone by the same types of people is a scam. The researchers don't write these puff pieces generally and the people that do spend the rest of their day writing "not technically a lie" type inflated corporate newspeak puffery that are basically "we're actually doing the customer a factor by charging more for less" tier lies.

It's also not unlikely that the experts involved provided a list of possible use cases and "making benzene from 3rd world dirt" was way down it and they had no idea the writer would lead with it.

I guess it'd be a good time to add some bacteria and life back into the soil that in a controlled manner.

  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*

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.

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.

That is the dude.

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.

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://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac...

A solvent which is tractable for complex waste reduction, and skin absorbed and would presumably carry those contaminants into the body.

But yea, I overrated it's nastiness.