The Beetle That Thought It Was A Precious Stone

circletimessquare writes "Queensland, Australia is well-known as one of the most important sources for opal in the world. Apparently Queensland has another untapped source of opal recently discovered in its backyard, except this source is not the providence of geology, but biology. A native weevil of Queensland grows opal on it's back shell! Implications for research into nanotechnology, biotechnology, and photonic computing are implied in the article. The journal Nature is publishing the more rigorous scientific write-up of the findings."

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Gold Bugs

[Colymbosathon ecplec]

I remember reading an article about bugs sweating gold: "Exactly what happened to cause Alaska's placer-building bugs to build up a gold molecule at a time isn't certain. Grossly oversimplified---and I certainly hope no chemist reads this---the metabolic products exuded by the bacteria interact with compounds in the environment virtually an electron at a time. So to speak, the bugs sweat solid gold. Others think the process may have had another purpose. British chemist Steven Mann speculates that the bacteria could be using "gold complexes...as terminal electron acceptors. If so, then this would be a novel form of energy transduction in anaerobic respiration"---that is, the gold buildup was an important part of the bacteria's life processes, not just a waste product like the crust of salt on an athlete's drying skin." Source

Make Your Own Gold Mine