Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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!"

18 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Dang it by clausiam · · Score: 4, Funny
    From the article: "although it may take millions of years to grow a really big one"

    Oh well, good thing I didn't quit my day job then...

    /Claus

  2. From the article.. by ewhenn · · Score: 3, Funny

    The highly prized chunks of gold may be the product of generations of soil microbes at work.

    I bet by the time you factor in health insurance, wages, and a 401K plan growing gold is no longer a functioning business plan.

  3. 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.

    --
    The ______ Agenda
    1. Re:Unspoken by rpresser · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Any chance this could be adapted to sea life? There's a hell of a lot of gold dissolved in our oceans...

    2. Re:Unspoken by The+Evil+Couch · · Score: 2, Interesting
      IANASME (I am not a subject matter expert), but, the concept is that the microbes make the gold soluable and then consolodate it by the microbes clumping together, so I'd say it'd work just as easily in water as on land.

      the problem that they're running into is that they don't know which microbes they're looking for. it's a "they'll know it when they see it" kind of thing.

      Of course, it's all just a theory. He could be wrong. But it certainly sounds plausible.

      --
      The World's Worst Webcomic!
    3. Re:Unspoken by Muhammar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Gold in oceans is very diluted. But low-grade gold ore is a different matter. There are vast amounts of it in Australia, often with gold yields below the cost of extraction.
      Composting lousy ore with some bacteria sounds like a nice proposal (compared to the current method - macerating it with cyanide solution).
      Now they need to identify the useful microbes and find out how to speed up the process, 10^6 years is bit slow.

      --
      I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
  4. what they do... by pb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, they don't really grow gold, they just sort of extract it and move it around. Unlike growing a potato.

    --
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
    1. Re:what they do... by Sparr0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, its not like potato plants extract anything (nutrients, water, etc) and move it around to form a potato... They just magically appear, spontaneous generation. Thank you mister 1700s.

  5. Anyone notice the .au domain? by andawyr · · Score: 5, Funny

    Takers anyone? Periodic table symbo AU is the symbol for what? Gold.

    Coincidence, but funny nonetheless.

  6. Flowers and mines by AtariAmarok · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now, if they could breed flowering potato plants that turn red in the presence of gold mines, we might have something here!

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  7. Only Gold? by MissMarvel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm curious if they did the research to see if this bacteria/fungus works with other heavy metals as well, i.e. Silver, Mercury. If so, it might be possible to adapt this type of process to the removal of heavy metals from soil and drinking water sources.

    1. 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.

      --
      I'm not just being paranoid- I've seen the data.
    2. Re:Only Gold? by mOdQuArK! · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's all we need - bacteria & fungi which collect critical masses of uranium out of the soil.

  8. how appropriate by TheSnakeMan · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does anyone else find it funny that the link was to a .au site?

    --

    They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.

  9. Re:Hey Dan Quayle! by RobertB-DC · · Score: 3, Funny

    Like, the plural of "hero" is "heroes", and "heroe" and "heros" are both wrong

    However, the plural of "gyro" (the sandwich, rhymes with "hero") is "gyros" [1]. Oddly, though, the plural of "gyro" (short for "gyroscope") is also listed as "gyros", though I would think it should be "gyroes"

    When I say them out loud, I can hear a long sound like "oes" in "heroes", where I hear a more clipped "os" in "gyros" -- though maybe that's just my trying to add a Greek accent. When I say "gyroes" out loud, emphasizing the "y" with a Texas drawl, it really sounds like an "oes". And my co-workers look over the cube walls to see what form of dementia I'm currently exhibiting.

    Potatoes, gyros, heroes... All this posting is making me hungry. Time for lunch.

    --
    Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
  10. Georgius Agicola said it first by geoswan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I have a copy of De Re Metallica, the 2nd book on metallurgy and related arts published outside of China. Rather I have a translation of it.

    Written in 1556, by a German, in Latin -- it covered labor management, metal working, ore processing, mining and prospecting .

    Agricola explained that gold grew in the ground, like the roots of trees. So, he said it first.

    (The first book was entitled Pirotechnia, written in Italian, in the city of Siena, in 1540, by one Vannocio Biringucio.)

    (I know Agricola doesn't sound like a German name. His real name was Georg Bauer. Like Nicholas Copernicus he translated his name into Latin. People did that back then.)

  11. Re:Ummmm....bad idea economically by geoswan · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Um, if gold were as common as, say, iron, or aluminum(*), don't you think we would still be using it? It would still make beautiful jewelry. It would still be an excellent conductor heat and of electricity.

    (*) Thirteen percent of the Earth's crust.

  12. I, for one.. by SiliconAddict · · Score: 2, Funny

    I, for one, welcome our new gold gathering bacteria overlords