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Money That Grows On Trees
parvez1 submits this piece about a process that uses plants to soak up and accumulate contaminants - and gold - from near gold-mining sites. Then the plants are harvested for their metal content. The plants aren't bio-engineered - he's taking advantage of the natural tendency for certain plants to accumulate heavy metals.
Wow, I remember a show called "What will they think of next" (sort of a pre-Beyond2000), talking about banana trees doing the same thing... wow, lets see that makes it almost 20 years ago?
meh
I think his point is that the plants are extracting a wide variety of heavy metals from the soil (cleaning things up). The gold is just one of the more valuable materials to come out of the cleanup process and help pay for things...
The point isn't to make money out of this. They're doing it to clean up the pollution. It's nice that the gold can be sold to cover costs and provide some education, but it's great that they can get the mercury out of the soil.
This is not a sig
the reality is ... [gold] is not uncommon at all, why go through a complicated refining process to extract grams when the same amount of extraction energy would be better put to extracting tonnes
It's true that gold is not uncommon. My grandfather, a rockhound, used to observe that gold is very widely distributed around the world. He'd say: "Where is gold? Gold is where you find it."
What makes this plant-based reclamation process valuable is that it allows people who own low-grade deposits (e.g. mine tailings) to recover the gold. Say I'm a mine owner, and I've dug up all the gold on my land. I'm in the gold-mining business, but now my business will die, for lack of gold. Sure there's more gold in the world -- but can I afford to buy another mine? If not, I can at least use phyto-remediation to extract some gold from my otherwise useless mine tailings.
Besides, the main point of phyto-remediation to remove toxic metals from the environment. The process may not generate enough gold excite the envy of Croesus, but it does pay for the toxic-metal cleanup
-kgj
-kgj
Gold is still available as a currency. At this time, many countries produce gold bullion coins with a face value. Here in the USA we produce the Gold American Eagle series (started in 1986) of gold coins, available in four different sizes (1/10 ounce, 1/4 ounce, 1/2 ounce, and One Ounce). While they are technically produced just for investors and collectors, they do have a legal face value and you could actually spend them, if you didn't mind paying about 8.6 dollars for every dollar you spend (the one ounce piece has a face value of $50, and at todays market price runs about $430)
Sadburger
... was actually called "Towards 2000" ... and they had a show on it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"Modern evnironmentalist organizations are nothing but anti-corporate, anti-progress, anti-technology, socialist whiners who would cut off mother earth's nose to spite anyone in a three piece suit."
Anti-progress sums it all up. Here is an interview with a psychologist who studied a certain breed of environmentalist (anti-nuke) and describes their psychopathologies.
In 1933 Roosevelt made it illegal for a citizen to own gold. They were forced to turn over all their gold in exchange for paper money.
In 1975, it was made legal again to own gold bullion. But money it ain't.
American money is actually more akin to cloth than paper. It's really considered almost a fabric. That's why it doesn't rip up when you accidentally wash it in your laundry.
People have know about this "soaking up minerals from the ground" thing for a while. Forinstance, tobacco plants soak up polonium(uranium?) from the ground and that goes in to your lungs, as well as the rat poison and what ever the hell is in those things.
But then we (homo sap. sap.)are good at this: we can accumulate lead in our bones from drinking water or contaminated air, and I believe that mercury too can get collected by the body (gets resorbed in the lower intestine, I think.)
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Bioremediation has been around for quite a while - it is a good idea in many situations.
There are a couple of things that really come out in the article is this - "First, he treats the contaminated soil with chemicals that break the gold down into water-soluble particles. Then he introduces the crops"
Gold and mercury in the soil is a pretty nasty amalgam - and gold being otherwise so *noble* - so I'm wondering how he's mobilizing it -
The article says the plants had purple leaves - "The plants he harvested had purple leaves because they contained gold nanoparticles" - again not totally breaking news - but he must be using something that can break the gold down *that* small (when there is a lot of gold in mercury, you can literally strain the gold out essentially with a filter like a cheesecloth - that is the technique that is being used by most miners of this sort in the first place.
Then they literally *cook* the amalgam covered pice of gold in a frying pan (though it could be done with nitric acid - or other things to remove the mercury from the surface)
In the process, a lot of mercury ends up spilled - and the residue from the *cook* is dense and fuming - and ends up not far away (like in the soil, the streams, or the miner's brain before too long) - Gold too small to picked up in the straining - In fact any microscale gold has been the subject of pretty intense interest because it is much more abundant than the occasional nugget -
Cyanide leaching is a very common process in areas where there is a lot of sunlight, since the cyanide can break down in holding pools - I highly doubt he would be using any cyanide - even if it could be shown to break down - it would most likely do very poorly on the plant side. Some halide - Bromides? Let's hope not. AuCl ion? - That's the most likely - or probably the most hoped for. There really aren't that many things that can dissolve gold - But there are actually quite a few ways to do what is being suggested with plants - here's one using geraniums.
Owning gold has never been illegal in the US. The executive order Roosevelt signed stated it was illegal to "hoard" gold, not to own it.
Actually, as the article implies, there would have to be at least a small gold deposit under your garden, in which case you could probably make money quicker by selling the land. It seems to me that the main implication of this discovery is that pollutants can be removed from the soil, not that significant amounts of gold can be harvested.
Last term at the University of Oregon, we had the conceptual artist Mel Chin give a lecture on one of his projects entitled "Revival Field".
It's quite similar to what Chris Anderson is doing in Chile and Brazil. Funded by a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Revival Field was the first experiment in the United States to use plants to absorb toxic metals from the soil. This launched the nation's burgeoning phytoremediation industry, which one business analyst predicts will be a $400 million dollar business by 2005.
microbial mining
microbial mining and manufacturing
... how much do you spend to get a dollar-worth of gold/other metals to grow on a tree. The article does not say that.
What the article does say is that he gets his money back. The harvested metals pay for the cleanup. It might not be a huge profit, the article doesn't mention anything about that, but at least it appears self-sustaining.
but there is a more interesting tale from France. In the 1700's, France engaged in the Mississippi Scheme, a stock-jobbing plan based on expected returns from the Louisiana territories.
It had the classic effect, most recently repeated in the Internet boom and crash.
At the height of the Mississippi boom, the stock in the Mississippi corporation was a better currency than the franc, and was used as the national medium of exchange.
When it turned out that nothing was really happening in Mississippi at all, the paper money suddenly became worthless, and everyone tried to convert it into gold, then sneak that gold out of the country.
As a result, the king ordered that gold be illegal as a medium of exchange, and that ownership of more than a pittance was also grounds for confiscation.
When the U.S. prohibited the owning of large amounts of gold, it was entirely different... they wanted to maintain the stability of the metal itself, as the underpinning of the U.S. dollar, rather than suppressing gold ownership entirely.
Don't forget that when the U.S. was on the gold standard, having a dollar MEANT owning gold. That dollar was a certificate for that much from the federal reserve.
They're designed to be evocative of the original eagle series from the 1800s through ~1930. Quarter Eagles were worth $2.50, half eagles were worth $5, eagles were worth $10, and double eagles (produced for a short time only) were $20.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
There only exists a limited quanity of it on earth, that is what gives it value.
Platinum is more rare and scarse than gold and silver, which gives it a much higher value per ounce.
Prices are defined by supply and demand on the open market. Latest prices can be seen here:
Metals
Brazil Nuts are naturally high in barium (0.3% by weight) and radium -- making it one of the most radioactive foods.
I wonder if plants can be used to extract waste pharmaceuticals out of the ground, too, such as destruxol and THC.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Here's a Spamazon link to the book.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sierra club was a pretty solid organization, but I heard some environmentalists were kindof trying to hijack it.
Personally, I just stick to volunteering at my local arboretum.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Use of bacteria to concentrate gold is done on a commercial scale in South Africa for about 2 decades already.
Oh well, what the hell...
Burning plants and doing something with the heat is not as bad as burning fossil fuels, because with plants it's a closed cycle ..... you are only putting back what you already took out.
There is nitrogen and sulphur in plants, but it comes from the air or from the ground. Nobody cared when it was there before the plants you grew pulled it out, elements don't change into other elements {except in a nuclear reaction which we are not considering here} so why should anyone give a monkey's toss when you put it back? And if you do something with the heat, like produce steam to spin a turbine to generate electricity, then you have saved the need to burn some amount of fossil fuel.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There exists subset C of A such that every member of C has property P.
Therefore every every member of A has property P.
Actually, there is this thing called statistics which basically states:
1) If C is a simple random sample of the members of A, and
2) C is sufficiently large to be representative of A, then
3) Conclusions drawn from sample C are reflective of A
And in such a situation, the statement according to the laws of logic, if your argument is valid, it is likewise valid for any values of A,E,C,P, provided the set containment relationships hold is not true because there are restrictions on C.
Psychology, and science in general, uses statistics to analyze data because it is not possible to measure property P of every member of A. Restricting your focus to C does not make the science any less valid provided the statistics are done right (which includes confidence intervals). Unfortunately, the statistics are often done wrong or the evidence is spurious, which is why it is important to stay on your toes and critically analyze an experimental setup before accepting the conclusions of a new study.
Most of what goes into making the bills is cotton.
And cotton grows on. . . Chevys?
It's a plant fiber, just like wood. Paper is felted plant fibers. Cloth is spun and woven fibers (plant or otherwise). Paper money is paper and has absolutely no resemblence to cloth, other then the fact that they're both made of plant fibers. It is the processing that determines whether said plant fibers are paper or cloth. You simply have an ingrained way of thinking cotton=cloth=blue jeans, wood=pulp=paper.
And you can make clothes out of paper (just as you can make clothes out of felted wool). Paper clothing was actually a bit of a fad in the 60's, especially in Japan, and you'll still find that hospitals contain a lot of it. Dupont is pushing for a return of the popularity of paper clothing in its impregnated form. It goes under the trade name Tyvek. Your outward most clothing (your house) may already rely on it heavily.
A good chunk of what is in your paper money that is not cotton is flax (and the rest is silk, which is an animal fiber. That's what the little colored bits are. It's really only there to make visible little colored bits), which when made into cloth is known as linen and it's really the flax content that gives paper money its rather unique feel. Go to Office Max or somewhere of the like and find some pure rag paper. This paper is cotton. It feels like very good paper, but it does not feel like money (or anything even vaguely like cloth, since it is not woven). Flax has fine fibers which are more "woody" than cotton (which is why cotton has largely replaced it for clothing), but of a peculiar smoothness and with a fiber length measured in feet rather than inches, and whose terminal ends taper to fine points (which is why flax is uprooted rather than cut).
If you wish to feel what pure linen paper feels like go to any printer that makes wedding invitations and ask to see some samples.
And as per my opening question, money, of course, already grows on trees, it's called "trees," which are as much of a tradable commodity as gold. Gold is not money any more than paper is money. Money may be made from paper or gold, but money is an abstracted medium of exchange, for which one obtains commodities, such as wood and gold. Or may well sell those commodities for if one possesses them but desires some other commodity instead, like a car or TV set.
If you really wish to make money growing trees, plant a black walnut grove, tend for 400 years, and then sell. You'll make a bloody fortune. If you have less patience tend for twenty years and then sell as a black walnut grove. Unless you live someplace like downtown LA you'll find that the cash value of the trees exceeds the value of the land they're growing on.
Wood is valuable stuff. It gets even more valuable as it becomes rarer, just like everything else. The main interest the English government had in New England was its trees. 90 foot clear pine for masts and 400 year old oaks for framing had become virtually extinct in Europe, but were absolutely necessary to rule the waves.
KFG
Gold is backed by lots of uses. It is valuable for use in photographic film chemicals; for its low resistance (in computer chip wires); for its low melting temperature (in jewelry); for its chemical properties (to stimulate some reactions).
And yes, the (asian) Indians do eat it. They pound either Gold or Silver into an extremely thin foil, then wrap their medicines in it, and swallow it. Likewise, in the Bible the children of Israel had to eat their golden false god calf.
Gold is also especially useful as a retirement and security account for Indian women. Their jewelry doubles as cash, if need be.
Gold is still valuable. On the other hand, one might ask what the US dollar is backed by. Some would say "the US economy". More knowledgable people might perhaps say "the fact that OPEC takes dollars". Yet others would say "the Japanese economy, which buys up dollars to obtain a favorable balance of trade." My brother would say "the requirement by the US government for us to pay our taxes in dollars." I'm not sure... but I'd bet that Gold has more inherent value than US dollars.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
This is why disposing of mercury is so dangerous. When plants and animals eat it, it never goes away. It's highly toxic and causes brain development problems which are scary because they're so minor that people often don't notice.