Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Skunk?

IrC - 30-4-2015 at 10:52

From http://www.infowars.com/americas-police-will-fight-the-next-... :

"Skunk, a type of “malodorant,” or in plainer language, a foul-smelling liquid. Technically nontoxic but incredibly disgusting, it has been described as a cross between “dead animal and human excrement.” Untreated, the smell lingers for weeks.

The Israeli Defense Forces developed Skunk in 2008 as a crowd-control weapon for use against Palestinians. Now Mistral, a company out of Bethesda, Maryland, is providing it to police departments in the United States, including the Ferguson PD.

Skunk is composed of a combination of baking soda and amino acids, Mistral program manager Stephen Rust said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Armament Systems Forum on April 20. “You can drink it, but you wouldn’t want to,” said Rust, a retired U.S.Army project manager."

I am curious if anyone knows what chemically (specifically) these 'amino acids' are.

aga - 30-4-2015 at 14:27

1,3,7 honkaminetripongeride & 2,1 stinkerazine

j_sum1 - 30-4-2015 at 21:12

My best guess is either thioacetone or an organic compound containing Se or Te. I have heard is said that a small topical application of these chemicals can give you a vacant seat in a bus for months. I am lead to believe that that statement is to be taken literally.

On thioacetone:
"Recently we found ourselves with an odour problem beyond our worst expectations. During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred yards away. Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable ... and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile, and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds."

carbon diselenide
Selenium compounds are, if anything, more intrinsically noxious than sulfur ones. Imagine a sort of hyperskunk, scattering its enemies before it and making them carom off trees and dive into ponds.

seleonphenol
"The biggest stinker I have run across. . .Imagine 6 skunks wrapped in rubber innertubes and the whole thing is set ablaze. That might approach the metaphysical stench of this material."

Pumukli - 1-5-2015 at 04:11

I would rule out organo Se or Te because of their (possible) toxic effects. I doubt any LEOs would use such compounds on the masses. (Am I too optimistic?)
Plain old thiols, thiophenols, or certain amines (indoles?) would be just as effective.
A few years ago a group disrupted a movie show here by spraying simple butiric acid solution. Although it was applied in a closed space (indoors in a movie).
It was kind of OTC too, because they reportedly bought the acid in a fishermen's shop in a small bottle as a bait ingredient. :-)

IrC - 1-5-2015 at 05:21

I would not want to eat any fish that liked that odor.

Pumukli - 1-5-2015 at 11:16

Catfish species seems to be attracted by the most horrendous baits which is not a big surprise because they are sort of scavengers. They routinely eat dead fish and such.
I can assure you that they don't stink or taste bad on the plate, far from that! They have tasty, low fat, high protein meat with the added bonus of very few bones! (I tried so far the Welsh catfish and some bullheads.)