Growing Your Own Gold

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!"

what they do...

[pb]

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

Re:Unspoken

[rpresser]

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

Re:Unspoken

[The Evil Couch]

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.

Re:Unspoken

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you're going to make gold, deposit it in the earth, and let your potatoes soak it up?

Sounds like the long way around Farmer Brown's Barn. ;)

Georgius Agicola said it first

[geoswan]

I have a copy of De Re Metallica [udel.edu], 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 [astragalpress.com], 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.)

Re:Unspoken

[Muhammar]

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.