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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
talk about a cash crop!!!
OMFGLOL i kill myself.
I like this guy, he's able to piss off tree-huggers and anti-mining people at the same time.
... 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.
small pigs seen flying over frozen lake of fire... Here is Tom with the weather...
...then where does paper come from?
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
Anybody who has ever played Animal Crossing knows that if you run around shaking enough trees eventually a bag of money will fall out.
Just be careful, some of them have bee hives.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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
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
If only they'd get working on "chicks for free."
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
... 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. --
my Breast-Tree is not so far-fetched after all.
"Sir, please no squeazing the fruit!"
Table-ized A.I.
Not only do we have to worry about how much gold/heavy metals will be left in the plant, a much more important question is how this material will be extracted. I assume that to get rid of all the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen that make up most of the plant, they would burn or heat the plant in some way, which could posssily contribute to pollution (since the Nitrogen containing compounds don't necesarily always go into Nitrogen gas). Also, since the plant is basically contaiminated with heavy metals, it really has no other side use, and so its only purpose will be for this mineral extraction. Is this profitable or feasible?
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
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.
What about deeper down in, say, the water table? What about runoff into rivers and streams? What I dont' like about this process (or maybe just this article) is that it seems to give a green light to irresponsible mining and toxic watest disposal by saying... "It's OK. We have these plants now. You can go crazy with the heavy metal polution."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I remember something similar was also done in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
They used leaves as money; the only problem was the galloping inflation that was caused by everybody suddenly becoming so rich...
I don't need a signature.
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.
...Panama Gold.
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.
...we'll be mining inner-city and third-world children for lead and mercury.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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.
This idea isn't really new, but it is interesting to see it applied to metals in soil. Fast-growing trees with tap roots have been used to extract contaminants from groud water for years.
The thing the article does not mention is how many harvests it takes to remove metals and the final concentration left in soil. Neither does it mention the processes effectiveness at removing other harmful metals frequently associated with gold deposits (silver, arsenic, lead, etc.). Metals like mercury and lead have human health and environmental impacts in very low concentrations. I'm not sure I would return this land to farming use without adequate analysis of post-remedial soils, but forestry may well be viable.
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.
We put it right next to the stereo speakers, and it harvested a lot of heavy metal too.
Bureaucracy loves company.
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.
Money does grow on trees?
My Dad is going to get such a punching...
Ooohhh, so, that's how they make "gold leaf"...
for years. Mainly using water hyacinth to clean up polluted bodies of water.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I'm no zoologist/biologist/ environmental impact assessor or environmental engineer but I do know that the concentration of the heavy metals and the likes increases up the food chain, i.e., the herbivores feeding on these plants would suffer from a higher heavy metal concentration which would not even be half as bad as that suffered by the carnivores/omnivores (think local human population) feeding on them...
Now, I'm sure that this person is very knowledgeable and will have tried to make sure that animals aren't able to feed on them, but as any engineer, I'm trained to be skeptical. It strikes me as difficult a thing to ensure, specially in such remote areas as the article mentions (Amazon... might also be of use in somewhere like Zambia/Congo, South-East Asia, Madagascar, etc.).
Furthermore, fast growing imports (shrubs, etc. which I presume would be of use here) could well outgrow the localised regions of the mines and start competing with the indiginous flora. Tropical forests take a long time to rejuvenate and tropical trees have very slow growth rates, which puts them at a sever disadvantage when having to compete against fast growing imports for space and sun...This phenomenon is to be blamed for the disappearance of the local ecosystem from such small tropical islands (e.g. Mauritius, Indian Ocean is one victim that I'm aware of) and so it is something that has to be borne in mind when you want to implement such a scheme.
I hope all of these are/will be factored in whenever such a scheme is to be implemented/ someone tries to "help" Nature recover.
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.
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.
Point One: The USA is the only *country* in the world with the name America in it, so far as google and I know,
Point Two: The people of a country always have a descriptive name related to the name of said country. For example: Russian, French, Italian, Canadian, etc.
Final Point: Would you really have us called 'YouEssAyyans'? 'Staters'? 'United People'? What -- seriously, can you think of a more descript name for the citizens of the US of America?
"America" does indeed describe to continents, and yes, most, ahem, Americans know it. If there was country called 'The United Factions of Europe', you can damn well guarantee they'd call them Europeans, and everyone would know what they meant. As a matter of fact, I have a friend who's South African. No one questions the legitimacy of this description of his homeland, even though there are certainly other countries that could be called South African (the continent). Everyone, everywhere in the world knows what someone means when you say 'American' (and yes, it's usually conjures negative connotation).
Anyway, descriptors of continents often connote ethnic background, which isn't applicable here at all. 'South American' suggests a clear ethnic origin, as does 'European', 'Asian', and 'African'. But what does 'North American' suggest? The only valid use of 'North American' is for discussions of geography, in which the word 'continent' would usually be applied anyway. I can *absolutely* say that if you're in Mexico and guarantee something with American money, they won't be expecting pesos.
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
...the last remaining superpower armed to the teeth with nukes. any questions? i didn't think so.
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.
Here's a Spamazon link to the book.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
oops, wrong link (once again, Google news links to wrong story) "The Supreme Court upheld the standards in February, 2001, and environmental and public health groups, including the American Lung Association and Environmental Defense, sued to force the government into action." here we go
With a match.
The ashes from burning the harvested plants {which does put CO2 back into the atmosphere, but only as much as the plants took out while growing -- and you can do something useful with the heat you generate, thereby saving you from having to burn a quantity of fossil fuel which would have produced the same amount of CO2 without taking it out first} will contain the metallic elements absorbed by the plant, either in their pure states {if they are particularly unreactive, e.g. gold} or as oxides. A book of physical and chemical properties of substances, something like Kaye and Laby for instance, would give you all the information you needed to devise suitable processes for separating the remains.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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...
Now if we could only feed all those starving children in Africa...
Well, if they use the resulting crops to feed the starving children in Africa, the problem should pretty much go away...
(Note - this post for entertainment purposes only. I do not support feeding poisonous foodstuffs to starving African children. However, I do see this as a good way of getting rid of some of those damn holier-than-thou vegetarians)
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."
Kinda reminds me of the 'knife plants' in 'Saucer Wisdom' by Rudy Rucker.
Eg: "Jose and Amparo are no longer careful about harvesting every last knife. Here and there dried stalks rustle, with rusting knives..."
The book's an excellent 'stab' at what the future may bring - recommended to
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.