So I was watching the Daily Show and after talking to a guest in his audience before the show a few weeks back, Jon Stewart opened his show by calling it Science Fridays. This led me to check out the site and I like what I see. Anyway, they have a video from Don Pettit (astronaut) who used candy corn in experiments with surfactants to see how soap cleans grease.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10210

To paraphrase him mid-video, "You have a blob of oil in the washing machine...hydrophobic/hydrophyllic sides attach to proper ends of water (or in our case I guess solvent?) and floats off and mixes with water..pour water off and left with clean clothes (or in our case, spice)"

I added in parentheses my thoughts, as it was while watching this video I couldn't help but think of how close it was to our extractions with DMT. As I type this I seem to remember someone mentioning wanting to work on a tek utilizing the washing machine as a centrifuge.

Anyway, I may be off entirely with this, but I thought someone else might find it interesting - if nothing else for other stuff on the Science Fridays site? One of tasmanian tigers and 'resurrection' of its genes with a mouse (slightly related genetically as marsupials 180-ish million years back) was successful, pretty interesting photo of a tasmanian tiger too on there, lots of interesting stuff!

But yeah, I'm no chemist, just know that lye turns things into soap, and I guess actually now that I think about it - it's more based on the acidity or basiness rather than the lye or soap itself..so damn. Still gonna post I guess tho!