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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."
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!
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.
Why not use tidal forces to pump the water ? Or even just wave power.
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.
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!
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
... 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.
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 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.
See, they are useful anyway.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
'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
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