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Group of Microbes Change Dissolved Gold to Solid
option8 writes " National Geographic, has a an article about a newly discovered strain of bacteria that might be used (though, as the article says, not cost-effectively) to harvest gold and other metals from seawater - a longtime fantasy of science fiction."
It can't be true!
http://books.org/scifi/acclarke.html
/scifi/acclarke.html was not found on this server.
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I can't imagine people can live satisfied doing this kind of work. Dammit learn to program.
I've been waiting for a way to lose my fillings while I eat my dinner.
Either the link is incorrect or the site has been slashdotted already by geeks who are looking for another way to make money for doing nothing after the demise of all the "get paid to surf" schemes.
You're using her as bait, Master!
"You couldn't use this process to harvest the gold from the ocean. The cost in pumping the water would be more than how much gold you could recover," he said. The gold particles excreted by the microbes are so tiny it would take about a million microbes to produce a gram of solid gold.
Heh, I'll give you a miracle of science too. Give me two bucks and presto! I'll give you back one.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Well, it's always good to see that Illuminati New World Order was right.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Its called "boiling". I once heard it described on TV..Apparently, you take a liquid, and you make it so hot that liquids turn right into gas!! Since water boils at 212'F and sodium dissolves at around 800'F, all you'de have to do is take a bucket of seawater, put a heat source beneath it, and wait!
This article gets my Most Dumb-Ass Article Of 2001 nomination. Its so dumb-ass you'de think Hemos was the one who posted it. Oh wait... he did post it. Hrm.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
...for those microbes!!! They are going to be RICH!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
The microbes might not be economically viable at extracting gold from seawater, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. A clever engineer could probably figure out a way of using the microbes to cheaply process low grade ore. That's currently done using environmentally dangerous processes like cyanide heap leaching (which is as dangerous as you'd expect a process using large amount of cyanide to be) but a microbe that has an affinity for gold could make that type of work much safer and more environmentally friendly. Yes it would take quite a bit of work, but gold is still valuable enough that people are likely to look into it.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
A million microbes is nothing!
Just let them breed for a few hours and you'll have billions
Straining the ocean for minerals sounds a little bit premature. An environmental impact study would be necessary to see if any animals in the ocean would be adversely affected by removing particular minerals from the water.
Why not use tidal forces to pump the water ? Or even just wave power.
They've been down for a couple of days now. Hacked again?
gold as a mineral isnt rare. for instance in sea water. only problem it is distributed widely in solution in minute quantities per gram. I read some years ago about mine dumps leaching metals, the problem was tackled by using some specialised bacteria. so using bacteria to concentrate metals is not new. seabed nodules are made by bacteria which gollect Nickel. but this takes thousands of years. by pumping sea water over beds of bacteria in factories the concentration of gold could be increased.
Nuke 'em, for all I care.
As the article mentioned, microbes are already used to clean up toxic water by eating dangerous heavy metals, and research has been done into the processes and genes responsible. Perhaps the genes could be switched into something land based, like a fast growing moss or other plant. Imagine if a company could make more money by covering old leaky strip mines with plants, then just harvesting them!
There must be something wrong here. A glass of water could probably hold billions of microbes. So it could produce thousands of grams of solid gold? Seems like a good deal to me.
Not this again.
The dissolved metals in seawater are supposed to be there. They are ions, positive or negative ions that play an electrochemical and a biochemical role in that ecosystem.
Gold is a very useful industrial metal, but it makes more money for the gold-miners when the gold is used as jewelry instead. Why not address the cultural roots of the gold-scarcity issue; making it less valuable in the market place by abating the jewelers' love for it would free up much existing gold for industrial use.
Most countries currencies are off the gold standard anyway.
Goat sex free since 2001
The actual use of this was afaik to precipitate dissolved Uranium and other dangerous elements out of streams and the such, so that people could then come by and remove the little nuggets.
... of something I saw on the Discovery Channel. Apparently after invading Spain the Romans wanted to extract the gold inside of a mountian. So what they did was order their slaves to dig a winding maze of tunnels through the mountain. Then the romans unleashed a river to run through the mountain. This effectively destroyed the mountain and stripped out all the gold. The water then flowed into a plain which held Marygolds I think, it some yellow flower anyways.
You don't exist. Go away. --SysVinit Halt
Everyone seems to think these bacteria are simply coagulating dissolved gold metal, something you could do by simply by letting water settle.
They're not.
The bacteria are reducing the gold from an ionized salt form (Ag+) to solid gold. That would take a bit more effort (and a ton of water pollution) for a laboratory to accomplish.
this is great! but why stop there, we can also harvest from say, people, and trees, and the ground! Excellent...
Do You Have Stairs In Your House?
When I first saw this I thought, "Hey.. now THIS is something cool!" Being able to take seawater that has diluted gold and make it into solid gold.
When I thought a bit further, though, I found this to be actually a VERY bad thing. The wealth/borrowing power of a nation is measured by its wealth (where gold is one of the primary methods of determining wealth). If this is an easy way to obtain new gold (where cost to get the gold is >= the gold gained), this could literally cripple the economies of the countries of the world. Heck, someone with a lot of money to blow and a "beef with the world" could drop some money into this in the hopes that this could happen.
"You couldn't use this process to harvest the gold from the ocean. The cost in pumping the water would be more than how much gold you could recover,"
You could use windenergy in order to pump the water or make use of the meganism of the tides.
Incidentally, Arthur C. Clarke wrote about using genetically engineered coral to extract gold from seawater in his 1975 book "Imperial Earth". However, the coral were extremely fragile, and eventually were only maintained as a curiosity.
Jobby
If somone could figure out how to selectively extract precious metals out of this mess we wouldn't need another hard rock mine in the US for a LONG time, plus our watershed may still have some hope; its probably too late though. The sad part is that, our leaders are more interested in sucking corporate dick while the taxpayers cover defaulted reclamation bonds. This place could be a really great place if there were only some accountibility.
For countries that rely on gold to back up their currencies, this would be a bad thing. Fortunately, in the US, we don't have that problem. There's probably a few others as well.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
I posted and all I got was this stupid sig
I believe it was William Jennings Bryant who stated something like "You shall not hang the nation on a cross of gold", or something like that...
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Not me. :)
-perdida
Oh, yeah. we are having quite a fun scientific argument over at adequacy.org
Give it a try, eh?
Is this really how you intended your life to go? Trolling weblogs on Friday nights? Wouldn't you rather be bent over the proverbial table being fucked right now?
If I remember my early 20th century history correctly (and I might not), Bryant wanted free and unlimited minting of money. This would have made it easier for farmers (his chief supporters) to pay off their debts (small farmers then had the same problems as small farmers now), but would have made inflation rampant.
Bryant would have wanted these microbes because his understanding of economics sucked. His understanding of evolution sucked, too (he was part of the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial). Hell of a public speaker, though
-jon
Remember Amalek.
is that I rather care who would be doing the table-bending-over, etc.
You could see in my k5 diary, if it were up, that I have a cute new hair-do and it makes jerks of both genders hit on me on the way to work.
Thus far, nobody who is not a) obviously insane b) drunk or c) hideous ever hits on me for some reason.
So, I could be doing something tonight but I would rather promote the magnificent website of which I am a part than deliberately spend money doing stuff with someone boring and dumb.
Besides, what are YOU doing trolling weblogs on a friday night?
-perdida
Will they be going IPO soon? Can I get a loan?
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
It isn't as cool as when Dr. Honeydew and Beaker on The Muppets changed solid gold into cottage cheese. That ladies and gentleman, is progress!
What if gold is essential for some unknown process in the seas? Maybe mining the gold will have some unpleasant side effects. I often wonder this same thing when I think about mining asteroids for precious metals. What if some proto-virus is brought back, a la "The Andromeda Strain".
Admittedly, this is far-fetched, but I imagine that even an inert substance like gold must affect the ecosystem, But then again, Maybe the amount that would be extracted is still tiny compared to the sea-water reserves. How much gold is in that water?
evanchik.net
Microorganisms brought out from the jungles have and are causing health problems in people. I wonder about things that eat metals around hydrothermic vents. A bug that consumes a trace metal would probably do much damage if it could survive in blood. The multiplication of disease vectors worries me.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
if i was on topic then i wouldn't be a troll you fucking goatsex goat fucker
why? because you obviously know absolutely nothing about physics or chemistry. You can't boil water and get gold, if you actually read the article, you'd know that the gold in water, isn't the gold that is used in jewelery and stuff. Gold is almost completely non-reactive, its why we use it.
Of course, spending the money to boil a liter of water to get less than 1 ppm of gold is a great money maker.
When the electrons are passed to or from the gold in the water, the gold is oxidized or reduced (depending on the state its in), and the gold is changed to its solid form. Although the article is wrong, its not like oxygen we breathe, because we don't reduce or oxidize oxygen.
In a related story, microbiologist Stanley Wellington has discovered a new breed of microbes present only in the craniums of US policitians. These microbes are believed to have co-devolved with public officeholders by metabolising ethereal common sense, and excreting it in a manner that protects a human brain from coming in contact with it. In a groundbreaking experiment, Dr. Wellington cultured the microbes, a feat in and of itself. "These bugs were particularly tricky, as many of my assistants and graduate students have above average IQ's", Dr. Wellington said. "Naturally, the microbes would thrive at a moderate proximity to the experimenters, but when we ventured too close, they would die suddenly. It turns out, that you can 'overfeed' them with intelligence, something that is unlikely to ever occur in their natural habitat. Working closely with leading animal trainers, we were able to train chimps to perform the various mundane functions necessary to culturing the microbes. The more complicated tasks had to be performed remotely, with very expensive robotic equipment..." After successfully culturing these primordial bacteris, he and his associates designed an elaborate experiment to more closely guage their activity. As it turns out, the very same chimp that assisted, could supply as much raw intelligence as 20 million politicians could over a 1000 year time span. Dr. Wellington states "We found this incredible. If you add up all local, state, and federal politicians, from the mayor of the smallest town, all the way up to Dubya, there are less than 8 million public office holders. Marty [the chimp] is clearly intelligent enough to perform all their duties simultaneously, and still provide better economic, defense, and social results." Dr. Emanuel Smith, of the St. Fredericks Bioscience Institute comments "Clearly this is the biological discovery of the millenia! I wouldn't be suprised if it were proven that these bacteria were infecting the voting population of the United states, as we've known for years that only retards believe their votes count in any significant way. For instance, this may be where the microbe prepares new hosts...". Asked if he believed a vaccine could be developed, Dr. Smith stated that hand grenades are far cheaper, off the shelf technology, and that you get to see the liars "splatter like rotten fruit".
The next phase of their research shall attempt to determine whether any other occupations are at risk from these brain-sucking microbes, such as grade school teachers, and NASA engineers.
Heard about this on the way to work.
Seems that they are looking at these critters for extraction of Radioactive material in water for nuclear cleanups at Hanford and Rocky Flats. I recall they can pretty much work with any metal, and they think that these guys are the reason there were/are gold/silver flakes in river and stream beds.
If I rember it right, and since I can't get on the link...thats all I have...you get these things going in a pond with radioactive sediments after a while they'll accumulate big enough flakes that you can strain it out.
There is talk about using them on the piles (cubic miles) of debris from gold and silver mines like Homestake and the mines in Colorado and California, as well as cleaning up copper mines in Montana, Wyoming and Utah.
... to think of harvesting metals for profit, instead researching the potential to de-toxify the environment, or even an organism that suffers from metal poisoning.
Granted, gold is extremely harmless to humans when ingested (relative to lead and mercury), but still...
In Bester's The Computer Connection (called Extro in the UK) a guy is extracting gold from seawater and trying to give it to artists in the past who died of impoverishment.
Oxygen is in fact reduced when it is used in metabolism, which is why we breath it. Oxygen in aerobic organisms is used as the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain in the mitochondria of cells. This is why the comparison stands--chemotrophic organisms like this use metals to act as the final electron acceptor.
'You couldn't use this process to harvest the gold from the ocean. The cost in pumping the water would be more than how much gold you could recover," he said. The gold particles excreted by the microbes are so tiny it would take about a million microbes to produce a gram of solid gold.'
Duh! It takes about 10 minutes for microbes to divide to make a million.
You design a slightly larger organism to eat these microbes.
Then, you design a fish that eats the slightly larger organism.
Then you have a goldfish! It's easy.
Bush's education improvements were
For 5,000 years, an once of gold was about the weekly wage for a high level person. This ended in about 1970.
how in the hell do you oxidize oxygen?
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
www.gata.org
to oxydize means to react in some way with surroundings. When people hear the word oxydation all they think of is cars rusting. Rust is a type of oxydation (the metal reacts with it's surroundings)
Metals have been produced from seawater for decades, and very economically, too. There are several which can be practically produced this way. But of that group, the only common *structural* metal which I can think of is Magnesium.
Magnesium hydroxide can be cheaply extracted from brine by precipitation when a cheap alkali is added - usually slaked lime (calcium hydroxide). The magnesium hydroxide becomes the feedstock for electrolytic cells which produce metallic magnesium. This second step is similar to the way that metallic aluminum is produced from aluminum hydroxide, after it is refined from bauxite. At one time, most of the world's magnesium was produced this way, though it may or may not be now - there are other practical sources. It is sufficient to say that the cost of electrolysis for magnesium production greatly outweighs the cost of the hydroxide feedstock, regardless of the source.
Uranium can also be produced from seawater, by various methods, but the cost is very much higher than either current world prices (very low right now) or even historical peak prices. It *is* however, *definitely* not too expensive for breeder reactor usage (breeders yield ~100 times more energy per unit mass of natural uranium). And there is something like 500 - 1000 times more uranium dissolved in seawater than all current, proven reserves in conventional mines.
In addition, I believe several other, non-structural metals are or can be produced from seawater. Rubidium, cesium, strontium, barium are perhaps possible. The amounts available is *usually* vastly larger than mine reserves.
Clearly, calling metal extraction from seawater "science fiction" is quite inappropriate.
-- Mike Greaves
hm, maybe in the metabolism, but not in the coversion from CO2 from O2. Either that or I just can't think today.
Maybe we can use this technology to help some of the Linux startups that are in trouble! The only thing we need for world domination is a neverending supply of gold! Great work guys!
Linux Rulez!!!!!!!!!!!
After the first world war Germany had to pay huge reparation costs. So, Fritz Haber tried to extract the gold from the sea water. Sounds ludicrous? Maybe, but IMHO it sounds even more ludicrous to create fertilizer from gases contained in the air - until you hear that Haber and Bosch did just that.
Who cares if you can't make any fair amount of Gold usig them, patent them, and make everyone else pay you! Just tell them the microbes were harvested in your IT department.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Did the platnum card advertised on that page come from microbes?
Now I can just pop a pill and all that wasted gold from Goldschlager can be ejected as a nifty keen solid gold nugget!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!