Bacteria That Produces Gold

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Researchers at Michigan State University have discovered bacteria that produces 24k gold. Quick, go check your nasty fridge, it should be PACKED with gold by now. :D

At a time when the value of gold has reached an all-time high, Michigan State University researchers have discovered a bacterium’s ability to withstand incredible amounts of toxicity is key to creating 24-karat gold.
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FAIL. They feed the bacteria GOLD chloride. They don't produce gold from lead or iron or whatever.
 
robble said:
FAIL. They feed the bacteria GOLD chloride. They don't produce gold from lead or iron or whatever.
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+1 to this!

It's not alchemy unless you're transmuting something utterly worthless like my car, my Compaq Presario, or EA Games into gold.
 
Cool, now we just need to program them to walk in patterns between grown diamonds on a circuit board.
 
Next up in the news:

Researchers have found a living creature that can extract oxygen from air.
 
The people working in the media are terminally retarded. There is no hope for them.
 
robble said:
FAIL. They feed the bacteria GOLD chloride. They don't produce gold from lead or iron or whatever.
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+a few million

They say it's the art of changing something not valuable into value, fine give me a few million gallons of gold chloride if it's not very valuable!
 
It would be interesting to understand the purpose of this experiment. I doubt it was to find a cheap way to separate out the gold from gold chloride. Although I have seen that mining uses acids and other chemicals to separate out precious metals from crushed rock containing trace amounts of such.
 
drescherjm said:
It would be interesting to understand the purpose of this experiment. I doubt it was to find a cheap way to separate out the gold from gold chloride. Although I have seen that mining uses acids and other chemicals to separate out precious metals from crushed rock containing trace amounts of such.
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At the risk of being Captain Obvious, you could ... read the article :D

Upon doing so you would discover that this experiment is actually an art project designed to make us examine greed and capitalism and blah blah blah.
 
I skimmed it however it appeared to be clearly written by someone who did not understand what they were talking about.
 
Ahhh. And I wanted it to be something useful for science and not just a government funded art project..
 
IcarusSC said:
At the risk of being Captain Obvious, you could ... read the article :D

Upon doing so you would discover that this experiment is actually an art project designed to make us examine greed and capitalism and blah blah blah.
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Yea, the article started off sounding scientific and then morphed into a 'this is an art project about alchemy'.

This entire project doesn't seem to be with the times environmentally, so I propose we commission a new project: How to extract pure dirt from useless mud using only the power of the sun.
 
DocFaustus said:
This entire project doesn't seem to be with the times environmentally, so I propose we commission a new project: How to extract pure dirt from useless mud using only the power of the sun.
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You'd get more funding if you studied "The effects of climate change on the conversion of useless mud into pure dirt".
 
I remember converting Silver Chloride into Silver, except that it cost more to buy the AgCl and the actual Silver was dirty and would have been quite hard to use.

I guess if there is a natural abundance of AuCl3(correct formula?) then it would be useful, but I don't think there is.
 
misleading title is misleading

gold is produced in stars
 
Platinum (Pt) is 1 proton short of becoming gold (Au). Mercury (Hg) is 1 proton more than gold (Au). You would think by now there would have been an effort to strip or add extra protons in from either platinum or mercury to get gold. However, I wouldn't do it with platinum since it's more expensive than gold, so Mercury seems like the place to go to strip that extra proton and turn it into gold. Yeah, evil plan is hatching. :D
 
Methadras said:
Platinum (Pt) is 1 proton short of becoming gold (Au). Mercury (Hg) is 1 proton more than gold (Au). You would think by now there would have been an effort to strip or add extra protons in from either platinum or mercury to get gold. However, I wouldn't do it with platinum since it's more expensive than gold, so Mercury seems like the place to go to strip that extra proton and turn it into gold. Yeah, evil plan is hatching. :D
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I believe this is extremely expensive/difficult to do and obviously not worth it.
 
When Earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago (piss of Creationists), the planet was basically a ball of magma and as the planet cooled, the more dense material (such as gold & platinum) sank towards the center, eventually producing a core made mostly of iron. Heavier elements such as gold & platinum are attracted to iron, which is why MOST of it is in our core.

So where'd the Gold & Platinum in our crust come from? Well, some of it probably just didn't sink, but a majority of it most likely came from asteroids, comets & meteors over the last 2.5 billion years when the Earth's crust was hard enough to prevent these heavier elements from sinking.

The idea that any form of bacterium could "create" gold (Au) in any form isn't ridiculous, but it is rather unlikely. These guys at Michigan State University were just looking for attention imo, but it's rather silly news in any case.

Reference:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...ls-earth-meteors-oldest-rocks-nature-science/
 
IcarusSC said:
At the risk of being Captain Obvious, you could ... read the article :D

Upon doing so you would discover that this experiment is actually an art project designed to make us examine greed and capitalism and blah blah blah.
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Kind of a misleading/disappointing article since bacteria is used for extraction of many metals in bioleaching.
 
c0mad0r said:
*stuff*
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I feel like it was mostly just media fail. They probably didn't mean they "produced" gold, but rather they converted it from one form to another, and to the average media idiot that means producing gold.
 
Methadras said:
Platinum (Pt) is 1 proton short of becoming gold (Au). Mercury (Hg) is 1 proton more than gold (Au). You would think by now there would have been an effort to strip or add extra protons in from either platinum or mercury to get gold. However, I wouldn't do it with platinum since it's more expensive than gold, so Mercury seems like the place to go to strip that extra proton and turn it into gold. Yeah, evil plan is hatching. :D
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totally been done...totally cheaper to dig gold out of the ground, by several orders of magnitude if I recall correctly
 
don't have any idea what the fuzz is about so based on the Article alone, since this bacteria is in the news does it mean that it is now easier/safer/cheaper to get 24-karat gold from gold chloride?, if it is then that's good news, if its impractical, more expensive, and harder, then Im guessing its just for science, yet then, the article talks alot about Art, which makes me more confused now :confused:
 
I believe that people have been separating gold using cyanide or mercury, so yeah, bacteria could be better
 
who cares about gold.

just print mo' money. That's what everyone's doing now right?
 
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