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PickledPackratParalysis
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Chemicals from Urine? Anything useful?
I just noticed that some of my bottled pee had evaporated, and the sides of the container were coated with whitish-yellow 'salt'. In another container
there were also about 1 mm diameter orangeish specks with the whitish-yellow 'salt'. I don't think the salt is NaCl (or however you say sodium
chloride), but it struck me that there might be a use for the stuff left over once pee evaporates.
Sorry if this is considered unduly gross!  I was just curious!
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BCNOFNe
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How old is this urine experiment of yours? Was the urine pretreated with anything to prevent bacteria growth?
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chemcam
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I am sure all chemists have pondered this at least once in their life. Well just think of all the compounds that get expelled from your urine, too
many to know them all, but urea would be present and is useful but not much would be there, many dissolved solids would crystallize out like iron and
sodium salts.
You would have to know your target compound and do an extraction, or you could distill the urine as well but I would think that is a smelly process,
ammonia from decomposing organics... Oh, if you are a heavy drinker it could be a source of Acetaldehyde, maybe?
But the question really is...why do you have bottled urine? Perhaps, checking for certain metabolites?
If you work up some turds maybe you can get a thiol or 2..lol 
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DraconicAcid
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Urine luck! I happen to have a book handy that gives loads of information on that subject!
Practical Physiological Chemistry (Hawk, 1916) has several chapters on urine, including the table "Composition of a normal urine (1500 cc)":
Water: 1440 g
Solids: 60 g
Urea: 35 g
Uric acid: 0.75 g
Hippuric Acid: 0.7 g
Oxalic Acid: 0.015 g
Aromatic oxyacids: 0.06 g
Creatinine: 1.0 g
Thiocyanic acid (as KSCN): 0.15 g
Indican: 0.01 g
Ammonia: 0.65 g
Sodium Chloride: 16.5 g
Phosphoric Acid: 2.5 g
...And other sulphates, calcium, potassium, and magnesium.
The salt is probably mostly sodium chloride, although there's probably a good deal of ammonium chloride mixed in with it (urea hydrolyzes to ammonia
upon standing in solution).
The same book gives a procedure for isolating urea from urine- mix 800 mL urine with 250 mL "baryta mixture" (composed of 1 volume saturated aqueous
barium nitrate and two volumes saturated barium hydroxide solution), stir thoroughly, filter out the precipitates, evaporate down to a syrup on a
steam bath (good ventilation required!), extract with warm 95% ethanol. Boil the extract with charcoal to decolorize it, filter hot, and stand the
filtrate in a cold place for crystallization.
Uric acid may be isolated from 200 mL of filtered urine by acidifying it with 2-10 mL of conc. hydrochloric acid and allowing to stand in a cold place
for 24 hours.
It gives a procedure for isolating creatinine, but it involves 10 L of urine and 180 g of picric acid- I'm not sure which I'd like to avoid more.
Hippuric acid may be isolated from horse or cow urine (500 - 1000 mL urine, add calcium hydroxide until it's basic, filter out any precipitate,
concentrate the filtrate over a Bunsen burner lame to a small volume, acidify strongly with conc. HCl, allow to stand 24 hours in the cold to
crystallize. Recrystallize from hot water, decolorizing with carbon. OR, mix 500 mL horse urine with 125 g ammonium sulphate and 7.5 mL of conc.
sulphuric acid, allow to stand for 24 hours, collect the crystals and recrystallize as above). If horse/cow urine is not available, then you can use
your own if you consume 2 grams of ammonium/sodium benzoate before bed, and collect the urine first thing in the morning.
Please remember: "Filtrate" is not a verb.
Write up your lab reports the way your instructor wants them, not the way your ex-instructor wants them.
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neptunium
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need I mentioned the 1669 isolation of Phosphorus from gallons of urine?
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PickledPackratParalysis
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Sounds like some awesome stuff! No, it was not sterilized...
Now the question is, is there anything I can do without a chemistry lab. I'm just getting started here... I have a centrifuge, mortar and pestle, and
household products that I can press gang into chemical use, but no Hydrochloric acid, barium nitrate, picric acid... etc etc...
I guess to have any fun I need to get some real chemicals, but what about doing it 'old school' like the medieval physicians who mixed up plants or
rocks and maybe boiled something in a pot?
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BCNOFNe
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I have a pdf of a NASA report that talks about all the fun stuff that they did with urine, it is pretty interesting and I would attach it to this post
but the file is too large. BUT if you do a google search for "nasa cr-1802" it should be the first listing.
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Nicodem
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Thread Moved
13-6-2013 at 12:28 |
Random
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Thiocyanate from urine sounds tempting. I would need 10L urine for 1g though.
[Edited on 13-6-2013 by Random]
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unionised
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I wondered about the thiocyanate.
It's not mentioned in the NASA document.
At that concentration, would it give an obvious red colour with Fe+++?
I think this report gives more realistic figures for [SCN]-
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01088426#page-1
something like 0.003 to 0.01g/l
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Random
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That seems more realistic. Maybe we could eat apple seeds and apricot kernels for higher concentration but I think it could increase amount of
ingested HCN to dangerous levels if big amounts are eaten on purpose.
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Adas
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I mixed some urine and a small amount of 37% H2SO4. The liquid turned somewhat orangeish and there was some orange-brown percipitate at the bottom.
But it stinked too much so I ended the experiment.
Rest In Pieces!
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platedish29
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Never, ever boil urine off at standard open ventilated regions any close to the population. Even chimmeys may risk your status to that which mostly
transcends the nature of a suffering corpse... thats an horrendous smell. furthermore you never gonna syrup up the urea the way down: it explodes way
too much.
A big deal is to prepare nitrates through straws and wood ash baths. Besides, I could never find the procedures to this but keeping things mostly
neutral, tapped, away from sunlight and urine-moist would be the proper chase to go if you pee a lot!
Oh yeah another good deal for the miserable drunk chemist: to have free nitric in hands
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PickledPackratParalysis
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I took a look at the NASA report... It seems that using electrolysis on the urine would 'convert' most of the organic molecules to C, O2, H2,
Nitrogen... forgot the symbol for that! But anyway, it then talks about straining the inorganic salts from the water using electrodialysis. I looked
that up on wikipedia, and saw that it is somehow using electric current to make a 'unnaturally' high salt concentration by forcing salt into one side
of the container. It doesn't really explain the 'do it at home' version though... I was wondering if something like a crude electrolysis cell could be
modified for electrodialysis.
I successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen with a homemade electrolysis cell and saltwater (probably baby stuff for you guys... I got it out
of a chemistry book). The problem for me of using this configuration, is that the positive was hooked up to an aluminum foil (anion?) which slowly
disintegrated into little flecks of aluminum in the salt water during the experiment. I don't think that kind of solution contamination would be
acceptable for experiments where it's the solution you want rather than gas released from the solution.
Any ideas for how to make a 'clean' electrodialysis cell?
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Adas
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I once tried urine electrolysis. I only remember some kind of bad smell.
Rest In Pieces!
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PickledPackratParalysis
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Maybe I should try it...in a well ventilated area of course.
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pneumatician
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hi, I get this salt from urine. no electrolysis, no chems added... so before I read a lot of chem literature... can someone tell me what the hell is
this ? 
http://verdaguer.com/391/pneumatician/microsal/
you can see some grains stuck to glass but this is by, I think, static electri.
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bfesser
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Yes, it's a nondescript white powder.
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zed
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Now, if a fella were commercially minded, he could trade clean schoolboy urine, for junkie urine. First, some junkies might be willing to pay well
for the clean urine....So they could pass their mandatory court-ordered UAs. Next, the junkie urine would be full of Morphine metabolites, that
could probably be converted back into Morphine.
In the early days of antibiotic therapy, Penicillin was damned hard to come by. The urine of some patients receiving Penicillin therapy, was
processed to recover the Penicillin, so it could be re-used. It was a matter of life and death. Patients considered hopeless, recovered from deadly
infections when the "Miracle Drug" was given.
Might be small amounts of really valuable stuff even in average urine. Antigen-Antibody complexes, and whatnot.
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testimento
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One could take a piss on a shallow pan to evaporate the liquids and minimize the amount of urea and other compounds being decomposed. Urea slowly
decomposes with moisture, AFAIK. So sad one person would only generate some 10kg of urea in a year.
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bfesser
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Thread Moved
24-7-2013 at 16:08 |
Pulverulescent
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Pure urea is stable in solution below ~30°C, IIRC . . .
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"
A Einstein
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chemcam
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Morphine Metabolites
Quote: Originally posted by zed  | Next, the junkie urine would be full of Morphine metabolites, that could probably be converted back into Morphine.
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Back when I was a junkie, I had this exact thought! I wasn't studying chemistry though so I had no idea what to do. I still don't really, but the main
metabolites are morphine-3-glucuronide (M3G), morphine-6-glucuronide (M6G), normorphine,
codeine, and morphine-3-sulfate.
The most present metabolite is M3G (55% to 75%).
These metabolites haven't been studied all that well by big pharma but they believe M3G is responsible for the addiction and pain killing potential
while M6G is responsible for the overdose effects; shallow breathing, etc...
Normorphine is the N-demethylated derivative of morphine and is a weak opiate.
Codeine is 3-methylmorphine an isomer of methylated morphine.
Morphine-3-sulfate? If it is the same thing as 'morphine sulfate' then what, it must just be unreacted?
I no longer use opiates but I am still interested in the chemistry behind them.
-------
Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Volume 66, Issue 9, pages 1288–1293, September 1977
DOI: 10.1002/jps.2600660921
Reference Link: Abstract
Isolation and identification of morphine 3- and 6-glucuronides, morphine 3,6-diglucuronide, morphine 3-ethereal sulfate, normorphine, and normorphine
6-glucuronide as morphine metabolites in humans
S. Y. Yeh
C. W. Gorodetzky
H. A. Krebs
Maybe someone can attach a digital copy of this reference in the following posts? Thanks in advance, I have a hard copy but its in very, VERY bad
shape. Coffee spilled on it, pages ripped... Basically, I tried to scan but it looks like shat.
Edit: Thanks for the move bfesser, I hope this gets some attention
Edit 2: Thanks also to solo for providing the requested reference.
[Edited on 7-26-2013 by chemcam]
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solo
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Reference Information
Isolation and identification of morphine 3- and 6-glucuronides, morphine 3,6-diglucuronide, morphine 3-ethereal sulfate, normorphine, and
normorphine 6-glucuronide as morphine metabolites in humans
S. Y. Yeh C. W. Gorodetzky H. A. Krebs
Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Volume 66, Issue 9, pages 1288–1293, September 1977
DOI: 10.1002/jps.2600660921
Attachment: Isolation and identification of morphine 3- and 6-glucuronides, morphine 3,6-diglucuronide, morphine 3-ethereal sulfate, (713kB)
This file has been downloaded 964 times
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bfesser
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Thread Moved
25-7-2013 at 17:27 |
mayko
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If you check out Experiments in Organic Chemistry by Louis Fieser, 1941 (available from the forum library), there is a chapter on isolating urea from
urine, as well as a chapter on eating sodium benzoate to increase the hippuric acid content of urine before isolation.
The latter in particular sounds like an interesting experiment that would never be done in a modern university.
Edit: This book also suggests adding a bit of toluene as a preservative.
[Edited on 19-8-2013 by mayko]
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confused
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autoclave the urine in a presure cooker, removing mibrobes
hook it up to a vaccum pump, with a cold finger trap to remove water.
then analyse/purify whatever compounds you want to extract
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phlogiston
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So, it turns out that current state-of-the-art metabolomics techniques can identify 3000 compounds in urine:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Regarding the benzoate, people suffering from certain inheritable metabolic disorders take it regularly in quite large amounts to reduce their plasma
glycine levels. It is also a common food preservative.
[Edited on 9-9-2013 by phlogiston]
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"If a rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down, that's not my concern said Wernher von Braun" - Tom Lehrer |
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