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Growing Your Own Gold

Posted by timothy on from the requires-patience dept.

An anonymous reader submits: "Scientists believe it may be possible to grow gold like growing potatoes. Time to throw away my IT degree and go back to being a primary producer!"

4 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Unspoken by cgenman · · Score: 4, Informative

    SMH.com.au has a more informed description of what happens. The gold is not "grown," it is "collected." Bacteria break down and carry gold material away from a larger vein, and another group picks it up and deposits it when they get to a chunk or nugget. ABC au also has a good article.

    So unless you happen to live near a large, undiscovered underground tract of gold, your chance of growing gold in your backyard like potatoes is just about zero.

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    The ______ Agenda
  2. Re:Only Gold? by Mangal · · Score: 3, Informative

    Other kinds of bacteria can- they've been used to collect copper from poor quality ore. One big hurdle, of course, is the efficiency/speed of bioremediation (bioengineers are working on that one, you can be sure). Another problem is how to get the bacteria in contact with the metals; water could be pumped through a filtration system (bacterial filters), but you can't pump soil. Directly applying the bacteria to the soil would require removing the bacteria and all sequestered metals after the fact- not sure how to do this effectively, either. Leaving the metals behind would defeat the purpose. The bioengineers will have to construct bacteria that work significantly faster, I think, to make soil remediation via bacterial activity feasible.

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    I'm not just being paranoid- I've seen the data.
  3. Re:Hey Dan Quayle! by tiled_rainbows · · Score: 1, Informative

    Actually, that is how you spell "Potatoes". It's the plural of "potato". People made fun of Quayle because he spelt "potato" "potatoe", which is wrong. As wrong as "potatos" (which is also wrong). Like, the plural of "hero" is "heroes", and "heroe" and "heros" are both wrong

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    evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
  4. It works for Diamonds... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    Which are not actually anywhere near as scarce as consumers are led to believe.

    The Diamond cartels hoard most of the Diamonds so that only a very small percentage is available for public consumption. Scarcity is manufactured, and the prices are artificially inflated to the financial gain of the cartels.