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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.
if Gold was actually scarce, the reality is it 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
I know you can sell/exchange it, but you can't trade it for groceries at the local Gas'n'Go... is gold even consider "money" anymore, or is it just pretty stuff with a historical sigificance that we still attach some value to?
from the article "Anderson's field trials also yielded an unexpected and potentially profitable byproduct. The plants he harvested had purple leaves because they contained gold nanoparticles, which are purple, not yellow. These nanoparticles melt at one tenth the temperature of regular gold - which makes them highly sought after for industrial processes, such as cleaning up carbon monoxide in fuel cells."
so where can get that chemical spray for the soil? I like to apply some to around here
By the sound of it, it would be more of a "pay for itself" decontamination process than a biological goldmine. As soon as the metals are cleared out, the land will be used to grow any other plants and most probably be stuffed with fertilisers. Then a few years down the line some other miracle plants will be used to clear those out and keep the cycle going...
Theory is that gold nuggets don't just occur by themselves, they're deposited by microbial colonies.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
These are the things which will move the world forward. The small wonderous discoveries which can actually change and fix things.
This example in particular is very simple and will have a smaller effect but it can potentially have a very vital effect on those in the region.
Other things like this will come around and some of them are going to have an amazing effect. I can't even define what that invention will be obviously...but maybe someone will someday make the air to electricity machine from Atlas Shrugged?
With computing power slowly ramping up and in some time nano technology being moved to a consumer level in combination with the printing of electronics (if we really even need that...with true control over molecular movements we technically could create whatever we wanted in a nice little microwave or whatever - a la star trek - and it really isn't all that science fiction...its just time and patience and some science)
People could soon be inventing the most amazing things in their own homes on random weekends...each of us will become research and creation experts...
its bright
Mad, adj : Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. Ambrose Bierce - The Deveil's Dictionsary
There's no need to move this stuff far, just crack the oil locally for the ethyl and methyl ester fatty acids after you've removed the heavy metals and you could power a diesel power plant which could probably power the whole project and the local village.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Sure, that's important, but as long as the process is cheaper than traditional decontamination processes then it is worthwhile.
Think of the harvesting as icing on the cake.
Greenspirit is not too far off. It's by one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, I believe, who stopped liking Greenpeace. His "environmentalism for the 21st century" is all about benefitting humans.
In any case, I could replace "environmental group" with "group" in your question and have the answer still be "no".
This was about 5 years ago, and she said this process has already been in use at that time.
make world, not war
Doesn't work that way. These plants are poisonous because they have absorb large amounts of mercury and gold from the soil. It logically follows that the pollen from these plants will also have a relatively high concentration of gold. Consider the microscopic size of a particle of pollen -- I'm making some big assumptions here, but that particle of pollen should have something on the order of a few thousand gold atoms. Every plant is born from exactly 1 pollen particle. So those thousand or so gold atoms will be spread out over the entire plant -- if you formed 10 thousand atoms of gold into a bullet, and shot that bullet into the head of the bee that pollinated the plant, the bee would live. Just ain't that much gold. And there's only half as much mercury.
The difference is, GM crops are genetically modified. These plants are just contaminated by heavy metals. If those heavy metals were highly radioactive, you might have a point -- but even then, a few thousand atoms per plant probably wouldn't do anything to anybody.
New applications of an age old idea are still news. How many times has there been /. discussions about a program designed for UNIX or (gasp) MS, being ported to Linux or other open software? New implementations of existing ideas are still news.
People have known for a long time that animals and plants tend to concentrate minerals. Some good. Some bad.
Fish apparently are very good at concentrating mercury from the ocean. Fish that eat fish that eat fish become interesting little mobil chemical factories. This a good reason why estuaries and oceans aren't good places to dispose waste. The fish will concentrate the waste and give it back to us in tasty McFish sandwiches. For that matter, the food chain is pretty good at concentrating heavy metals in the belly of beasts. This has been known for quite a while.
The reason we need to clean up tailings piles is because humans are really good at concentrating chemicals.
One of the most interesting chemical/animal relations that I've heard of lately is that salmon bring up a great deal of nitrogen from the ocean. They fertilize the forests that provide the nutrients for baby salmon. Blocking the salmon run with damns decreases the value of the wood in the forest.
So far, it's been two hours since this was posted, and no one's mentioned tiberium? [Okay, someone mentioned Command & Conquer, and was maked 'offtopic', even though he wasn't.]
For those of you non-gamer geeks, the basic premise for money production in the game was that there was this plant, tiberium, which would leech minerals from the ground, and you would collect it up, and you'd get a source of funding that you could use to produce troops, tanks, buildings, whatever to take out your opponents.
Of couse, the problem was, that regular troopers were harmed if they went into a tiberium field. [However, they only took damage for moving, in the original game]. Later sequels introduced a mutant army, who healed if they were in a tiberium field.
Red Alert had crystal fields, which just wasn't the same [they didn't regenerate for one], and C&C Generals uses supply depots -- no concept of tiberium at all. [The best thing about tiberium was that it grew over time, as opposed to being a fixed resource]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
depends on how much work you do.... a bag of seed corn is fairly reasonable in price...eyeballing the effort to plant it etc you are probably out no more then $1800 an acre if that.
Considering that you then recover $6300 an acre in gold that is not a bad return.
I could ask my cousin Rog how much he spends per acre raising corn on the farm but by the time I got the answer the thread would be moldy oldy....
They pipe their waste water through reed beds to remove contaminants. They've had them in place since the 1960s.
It isn't just the reeds themselves which clean the water, they support microbiological colonies which break down organic and inorganic toxins and fix heavy metals in the soil keeping them out of the ground water.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Don't be so sure it can't eventually make money. The microbial process (also called bio-leach) sounds environmentally better than the cyanide heap-leach mining process popular now. Such processes are useful for thin gold ores (less than one ounce/ton).
For example, the low gold content in alluvial fans, downwash from the Chocolate Mountains outside Glamis Calif. never interested the gold-rushers of the 1800s, but since heap and vat leaching was introduced in the 1970s, probably more gold has come out of that mine than in all the placers in the north. Last I checked (it was a while ago) they had pulled more than half a billion dollars worth of gold out of there. Larger mines exist in Nevada and Montana.
The bio process is being refined because the mining companies fear tightening environmental regulations will result in the eventual banning of the cyanide-based processes.
In some countries, the gold in your property does not belong to you, and unless you can get an authorization you can't mine it. Using this technology you would be able to mine the gold without the authorization, I mean, who would get suspicious about some trees in your land?
Just some thoughts...
OK, well it's time for you "reasonable" tree huggers to step up and take the reigns from the watermelon
Sorry, no can do. You see, in a democracy, there's nothing I can do on one hand to keep those people from expressing their opinions, and on the other from keeping the right wing character assasination machine from taking the opinion of the "loonies" and making it stand for the whole
Please, take back the environmental movement from the loonies.
Impossible to do dir, since it never belonged to them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.