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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.
I like this guy, he's able to piss off tree-huggers and anti-mining people at the same time.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.