I agree.. It used to be hugely popular, back in the day science and alchemy were one in the same. Albert Einstein apparently used to real old alchemy books before bed.
The part he says about gold being formed by bacteria sounds bullcrap 2 me, correct me if im wrong but gold is formed in super novas so there is a finite amount of gold on earth
It is bullcrap lol. The only way we're going to get more gold on earth is if: 1. Energy is almost free (fission/fusion becomes widespread) such that we can artifically synthesize Gold through particle bombardment or other methods. 2. An asteroid made of Gold hits the planet
I read somewhere that a lab can create gold but it worked out to be $10 million per gram, not really economical. Probably easier to filter it out of seawater.
An asteroid made of gold!! That image has never entered my head. Thank you fishball for creating that image for me
Interesting... Still it isn't really making any Gold, more like 'crystallizing' or precipitating it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupriavidus_metallidurans
True - but there's potential commercial applications, and it does involve bacteria. Growing gold with silver and yeast is a different story.
This process is of some interest to my R&D with Alcheteq. (You can guess what we do....) Certainly there seems insufficient forces at play here to carry out any nuclear transformation. The fundamental problem with this idea, is that the yeast bacteria will attack the silver. Owing to the oligodynamic effect the free ions have on both the nucleus and cell wall of the bacteria, this is pretty unlikely. What's more likely is that the yeast bacteria themselves are dying after more than 60 minutes contact with the silver, and the resultant "gold" is merely a dead yeast compound, deposited on the silver surface. The yeast require carbohydrate products to thrive and breed, and then would produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. A simple test would be to drop some treated shot into a sugar solution after the process is finished, (after washing silver shot, before nitric is added) and see if any carbon dioxide is produced. If not - yeast are just dead. And dead yeast tell no tales... And I just read the post above on Metallidurans. Yes, these little blighters are immune to the toxic effect heavy metals have on other bacterium, but they need aqueous gold tetrachloride to begin with to produce a bacterioform. Cheers, ST
Meteors - the wisdom of Joe Dirt: Meteor Bert: Well, it ain't a meteor. Joe Dirt: Yeah, it is. It came out of the sky. Meteor Bert: Well I'm sure it did but it ain't no meteor. It's a big ol' frozen chunk o' shit. Joe Dirt: What? Meteor Bert: Oh yeah, see them airplanes they dump their toilets 36,000 feet. The stuff freezes and falls to earth. We call 'em Boeing bombs. [chomps teeth] Joe Dirt: No, that can't be. That's not what it is. Meteor Bert: Oh, afraid so. See that peanut? Dead giveaway. Joe Dirt: Uhhh, no, that's a space peanut. Meteor Bert: No, afraid not. That just a big ol' frozen chunk of poopy. Oddly amusing movie if you leave most of your brain asleep.
Well, a bit off topic but I don't think that is a bad thing.... There is Gold in seawater, not very concentrated but it is there. Extracting it is cost prohibitive but one of the methods being discussed is bio concentration. The idea is you get an algae/bacterium to filter the seawater, most things pass through but you engineer it to withhold the gold, eventually the organism dies from gold poisoning. Of course there is not one solitary organism but billions of them all breeding and multiplying and eating gold. You then just scoop up all the organisms, dead and alive and you recover the gold. Now we just have to find the organism.
Found this in Dr Karl Trek... Bacteria Make Gold The largest single lump of gold ever discovered on our planet was found in Australia. It was the Holterman Nugget, and it was found in Hill End in NSW on 19 October, 1872. The whole nugget weighed 235.1 kg, and contained 93.3 kg of pure gold. (Strictly speaking, the Holterman Nugget was not really a nugget, but a mass of gold found in a reef.) Many of the world's large gold nuggets have come out of Australia - the Hand of Faith (27.2 kg), the Welcome Stranger (73.4 kg), and the Welcome (69. 9 kg). Ever since I was a kid, one thing about nuggets has always struck me as odd - they look so 'organic', like a lumpy mis-shapen potato. Well, my gut feeling might have been right. According to some recent research, gold nuggets might have been assembled by living creatures! Gold is usually found either as a free metal in the gravel of streams and rivers, or else intermingled with quartz in veins in the rock. In 1988, South Africa mined 621 tonnes of gold, the USA mined 205 tonnes, with Australia at third place with 152 tonnes - a total of 978 tonnes of gold. This gold would fit into a box 3.7 metres on each side. (The richest goldfield in the world is the Witwatersrand in South Africa - the rand, South Africa's currency is named after this goldfield). There is some gold in the oceans, but it would be hard to get rich by processing it. There are only ten grams of gold in each cubic kilometre of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. However, the Mediterranean Sea is three times more concentrated in gold (probably because it is landlocked, and the gold washed in from the rivers takes longer to get diluted). Gold is very inert, and very resistant to attack by chemicals. If you bury some in your backyard, it will look the same in thousands of years. It is used in jewellery, because it does not tarnish, because it is soft and easy to work and because it is very rare. About 65% of gold is used in the jewellery trade. The electrical, electronic and other industrial fields use 25% of the gold mined. Gold is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and does not tarnish or oxidise. Gold can be beaten into a transparent gold foil (0.00013 mm thick) over 500 times thinner than a human hair. Dentistry uses about 7% of the gold produced. Here it is alloyed with other metals (such as copper, silver, platinum and palladium) for restorations, partial dentures, bridges and inlays. Now some scientists believe that bacteria might have actually laid down some of the gold deposits in the first place. After all, when a bacteria called Pedomicrobium lives in water rich in dissolved minerals, it will actually build up layers of iron or manganese oxide around itself - like a shell. Scientists from Macquarie University have suggested that many gold deposits in Venezuala might have been laid down by bacteria. And just recently, John R. Watterson of the US Geological Survey, claims to have found proof in Alaska. Now when most people find a lump of gold in their gold-panning dish, they quickly turn it into cold hard cash - and have a party. But when John R. Watterson got his gold, he looked at it with a scanning electron microscope. To his surprise, most of the tiny particles of gold that he had collected from nine Alaskan rivers were not solid little lumps. Instead, they looked like gold-plated bacteria. What he saw was a lacy pattern of tiny cylinders joined by thin rods. The cylinders were the same size as the Pedomicrobium bacteria. Now gold stops most bacteria dead in their tracks - with suffocation. It blocks up the tiny holes in the cell walls through which food comes in and wastes go out. But Pedomicrobium, has an unusual way of reproduction. Most bacteria make babies just by splitting into two separate cells. But Pedomicrobium reproduces by budding. It stretches out a narrow stalk which rises above the gilded cage closing around the parent bacteria. This narrow tube then opens up (at the end) to make a new bacteria. So new baby bacteria are continually being born just on the outside of an expanding ball of golden death. It's a slow process - it takes over a year to 'grow' a gold grain roughly the thickness of a human hair (about 0.1 mm). It would take a long time to 'grow' a 70 kg nugget. (Maybe we could speed the process up, by genetically engineering the Pedomicrobium bacteria.) There are similar lacy patterns in 2.8 billion-year-old South African gold, and in 220 million-year-old Chinese gold. Of course, when you melt the gold in a furnace, the carbon from the bacteria just vaporises into carbon dioxide, leaving behind pure gold. The bacteria don't actually ''make'' the gold - they just attract gold that is already dissolved in the groundwater. Now we have absolutely no idea why these bacteria can purify gold to almost 24 carat purity. But maybe now we know what happened to Midas in the old Greek fable, when everything he touched turned to gold. He might have been a victim of accidental genetic engineering, when he got infected with some Pedomicrobium bacteria. And perhaps there's a moral for us. If you try to get too much gold, it will just suffocate you. Copyright Karl S. Kruszelnicki
Google it sometime. Heres a good start. http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&xhr...gc.r_pw.&fp=4e643e3d7b1fb46f&biw=1509&bih=903 Google says bacteria make gold. I remain neutral just passing on information.
I read a while ago japan tried to refine gold from human waste. Back when gold hit $1000 Apparently human waste carries gold too. Dunno how Drink sea water? Ate jewelry? Ate gold carrying bacteria? We are made of gold(like hell)? I guess for the hygienically challenged, you can now store and stack poo.
Japan are also making burgers actually made from faecal waste. You'd think they'd have better things to do other than experiment with eating their own excrement. A once proud warrior civilisation now reduced to this. Sad really.
