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Science

Group of Microbes Change Dissolved Gold to Solid 126

Posted by Hemos from the reduce-reuse-recycle dept.
option8 writes " National Geographic, has a an article about a newly discovered strain of bacteria that might be used (though, as the article says, not cost-effectively) to harvest gold and other metals from seawater - a longtime fantasy of science fiction."
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Group of Microbes Change Dissolved Gold to Solid More

Group of Microbes Change Dissolved Gold to Solid

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  • I've been waiting for a way to lose my fillings while I eat my dinner.

  • Check those links before you submit! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Robber Baron ( 112304 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @06:50PM (#2241560) Homepage
    Either the link is incorrect or the site has been slashdotted already by geeks who are looking for another way to make money for doing nothing after the demise of all the "get paid to surf" schemes.
  • "You couldn't use this process to harvest the gold from the ocean. The cost in pumping the water would be more than how much gold you could recover," he said. The gold particles excreted by the microbes are so tiny it would take about a million microbes to produce a gram of solid gold.

    Heh, I'll give you a miracle of science too. Give me two bucks and presto! I'll give you back one.

    • Re:cost efficient (Score:3, Interesting)

      by aibrahim ( 59031 )
      So...it is useful to reduce the costs of operating water purification facilities. Cities have to run those anyway, so if you install these and capture/harvest the gold that is in the water you are already pumping, you effectively reduce the costs.


      See, they are useful anyway.

      • Plus a million microbes wouldn't take up much room, or much time to create (little bleeders breed like rabbits), so a simple mash tun with billions of the critters inside could be cost effective quite quickly. Maybe Budweiser can lend me one as they seem to have enough already.
  • Well, it's always good to see that Illuminati New World Order was right.

  • Here's a brilliant idea.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @06:53PM (#2241573) Homepage


    Its called "boiling". I once heard it described on TV..Apparently, you take a liquid, and you make it so hot that liquids turn right into gas!! Since water boils at 212'F and sodium dissolves at around 800'F, all you'de have to do is take a bucket of seawater, put a heat source beneath it, and wait!

    This article gets my Most Dumb-Ass Article Of 2001 nomination. Its so dumb-ass you'de think Hemos was the one who posted it. Oh wait... he did post it. Hrm.

    Cheers,
    • why? because you obviously know absolutely nothing about physics or chemistry. You can't boil water and get gold, if you actually read the article, you'd know that the gold in water, isn't the gold that is used in jewelery and stuff. Gold is almost completely non-reactive, its why we use it.

      Of course, spending the money to boil a liter of water to get less than 1 ppm of gold is a great money maker.

      When the electrons are passed to or from the gold in the water, the gold is oxidized or reduced (depending on the state its in), and the gold is changed to its solid form. Although the article is wrong, its not like oxygen we breathe, because we don't reduce or oxidize oxygen.

  • Wow, this is fantastic... (Score:3, Funny)

    by throx ( 42621 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @06:53PM (#2241574) Homepage
    ...for those microbes!!! They are going to be RICH!

  • Maybe not seawater (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Friday August 31, 2001 @06:54PM (#2241575) Homepage

    The microbes might not be economically viable at extracting gold from seawater, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. A clever engineer could probably figure out a way of using the microbes to cheaply process low grade ore. That's currently done using environmentally dangerous processes like cyanide heap leaching (which is as dangerous as you'd expect a process using large amount of cyanide to be) but a microbe that has an affinity for gold could make that type of work much safer and more environmentally friendly. Yes it would take quite a bit of work, but gold is still valuable enough that people are likely to look into it.

    • Re:Maybe not seawater (Score:2, Informative)

      by Dylbert ( 139751 )
      Cyanide Heap Leeching is not necessarily dangerous to the environment until it is released to a tailings storage facility (A big pond containing the refuse cyanide solution from the process). The beauty of (hopefully) running gold ore through a microbe solution instead of a cyanide solution is that if it were pumped a similar TSF-style pond, the ore would continue to break down (not just gold, but iron and other metals too) whilst it is in the pond.

      Enormous potential.

  • A million microbes? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jedwards ( 135260 )
    A million microbes is nothing!
    Just let them breed for a few hours and you'll have billions

  • Why not use tides ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Salsaman ( 141471 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @06:55PM (#2241588) Homepage
    It says in the article that the 'cost of pumping the seawater' would be more than the value of the gold recovered.

    Why not use tidal forces to pump the water ? Or even just wave power.

    • Perhaps they were considering pumping the water up from the hydrothermal vents where the concentration is higher? Or perhaps they just forgot about tides...

    • Re:Why not use tides ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dragons_flight ( 515217 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:22PM (#2241665) Homepage
      A lot of bacteria that are found in exotic environments, such as hydrothermal vents, aren't horribly happy when moved far away from those environments. (After all if they were competitive in other places, you'd expect them to show up more widely in the ocean).

      The article doesn't say, but they may require high temperature, high pressure, or unusual mineral solutions in order to grow and do their thing. This naturally leads to higher costs, at the very least causing you to pump water through some tank designed to keep them happy. Some of the bacteria used in environmental cleanup etc, are actually genetically modified versions meant to survive in environments other than where the trait developed. Of course on the other hand we might get lucky and they do like sitting on the beach churning out gold.

      If it can be made profitable I'm sure someone will do it.
    • "Why not use tidal forces to pump the water ? Or even just wave power."

      You couldn't just let the bacteria escape into the ocean. It's not simply a matter of lowering a cage of bacteria into the ocean - you'd need to put the seawater in with the bacteria, leave it to work for a few days at least, then filter out the millions of tiny bacteria and put them in a box. (It's much similar to the technique used to produce insulin with genetically modified bacteria, only with gold instead of insulin.)

      After all that, you're left with a tank maybe the size of a swimming pool full of sea water - and there's maybe only a milligram (or LESS) of gold in the whole thing.

      Suffice to say, it's rarely worth it unless you're sure there's a whole bunch of Au dissolved in your patch of the Atlantic.

  • gold in sea water (Score:5, Interesting)

    by guest12 ( 248543 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:00PM (#2241604)
    gold as a mineral isnt rare. for instance in sea water. only problem it is distributed widely in solution in minute quantities per gram. I read some years ago about mine dumps leaching metals, the problem was tackled by using some specialised bacteria. so using bacteria to concentrate metals is not new. seabed nodules are made by bacteria which gollect Nickel. but this takes thousands of years. by pumping sea water over beds of bacteria in factories the concentration of gold could be increased.

  • Genetic Use? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zergwyn ( 514693 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:02PM (#2241612)
    As the article mentioned, microbes are already used to clean up toxic water by eating dangerous heavy metals, and research has been done into the processes and genes responsible. Perhaps the genes could be switched into something land based, like a fast growing moss or other plant. Imagine if a company could make more money by covering old leaky strip mines with plants, then just harvesting them!
  • From the article: Lovley isn't encouraging....The gold particles excreted by the microbes are so tiny it would take about a million microbes to produce a gram of solid gold.

    There must be something wrong here. A glass of water could probably hold billions of microbes. So it could produce thousands of grams of solid gold? Seems like a good deal to me.

    • You aren't very smart, are you?

      The microbes aren't made out of gold, they find the gold and lump it together.

      So, yes, you could fit the microbes in a glass of water. The gold? There's not even a millimicrogram of gold in your drinking water.

      It would take billions of liters to produce a sizable amount of gold.
      • The problem is with a billion liters of seawater you will have quite a bit of salt if any of the water evaoprates. Gold in the ocean is about 5 to 50 parts per trillion. You would need a shallow lake about 1km on a side to hold enough ocean water to get an ounce of gold.

  • Oh no. (Score:3, Funny)

    by perdida ( 251676 ) <thethreatprojectNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:17PM (#2241648) Homepage Journal
    Not this again.

    The dissolved metals in seawater are supposed to be there. They are ions, positive or negative ions that play an electrochemical and a biochemical role in that ecosystem.

    Gold is a very useful industrial metal, but it makes more money for the gold-miners when the gold is used as jewelry instead. Why not address the cultural roots of the gold-scarcity issue; making it less valuable in the market place by abating the jewelers' love for it would free up much existing gold for industrial use.

    Most countries currencies are off the gold standard anyway.

    • Re:Oh no. (Score:3, Funny)

      by bonzoesc ( 155812 )
      You greatly underestimate the desire of people for objects that are shiny. Go to a record store and look at the cover of a rap album.
    • If I'm not mistaken it's actually quite difficult to get relatively inert gold atoms into an ionized state. That's why it retains its luster when a treasure is lost in seawater for centuries, and one of the reasons it's useful in industry. Frankly I've never heard of any biological process involving Au or its ions, but INABc (I am not a Bio-chemist). There isn't an FDA recommended allowance of gold, is there?
    • Why not address the cultural roots of the gold-scarcity issue...

      That's happening. And the World Gold Council [gold.org] is trying to slow it down. The price of gold is way down from the peak. Gold is down about 75% in constant dollars from the peak in the 1970s. There are closed gold mines all over the world, ready to reopen if the price goes up. And central banks have been selling off gold ("why are we storing this stuff?").

      The World Gold Council is trying to prop up the price with a campaign along the lines of the "Diamonds are Forever" campaign that the DeBeers Central Selling Organization ran for decades. It's not working.

  • The actual use of this was afaik to precipitate dissolved Uranium and other dangerous elements out of streams and the such, so that people could then come by and remove the little nuggets.
    • "precipitate dissolved Uranium and other dangerous elements"

      Oh yes. Uranium is soooo dangerous. It's about 600 times more common in the Earth's crust than Gold is (~2 ppm vs ~3 ppb). Good luck precipitating all of it out.

  • Reminds me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Plasmoid ( 8367 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:21PM (#2241663)
    ... of something I saw on the Discovery Channel. Apparently after invading Spain the Romans wanted to extract the gold inside of a mountian. So what they did was order their slaves to dig a winding maze of tunnels through the mountain. Then the romans unleashed a river to run through the mountain. This effectively destroyed the mountain and stripped out all the gold. The water then flowed into a plain which held Marygolds I think, it some yellow flower anyways.

  • Redox! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Negadecimal ( 78403 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:27PM (#2241683)
    Everyone seems to think these bacteria are simply coagulating dissolved gold metal, something you could do by simply by letting water settle.

    They're not.

    The bacteria are reducing the gold from an ionized salt form (Ag+) to solid gold. That would take a bit more effort (and a ton of water pollution) for a laboratory to accomplish.
    • On that note, you can use mercury to extract solid gold particles from water... just run the water over a bed of liquid mercury, separate the layers, and boil the mercury off. Of course, the mercury fumes will knock out your sanity...but that's another matter ;)
  • When I first saw this I thought, "Hey.. now THIS is something cool!" Being able to take seawater that has diluted gold and make it into solid gold.

    When I thought a bit further, though, I found this to be actually a VERY bad thing. The wealth/borrowing power of a nation is measured by its wealth (where gold is one of the primary methods of determining wealth). If this is an easy way to obtain new gold (where cost to get the gold is >= the gold gained), this could literally cripple the economies of the countries of the world. Heck, someone with a lot of money to blow and a "beef with the world" could drop some money into this in the hopes that this could happen.
    • For countries that rely on gold to back up their currencies, this would be a bad thing. Fortunately, in the US, we don't have that problem. There's probably a few others as well.
      • I should also point out that it is because of the situation mentioned above that the US does not use the gold standard. We learned right after the Gold Rush in California that relying on gold for the value of currency is not good.

        I believe it was William Jennings Bryant who stated something like "You shall not hang the nation on a cross of gold", or something like that...

        • Re:First observations compared to a reasoned respo (Score:4, Insightful)

          by TWR ( 16835 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @08:50PM (#2241900)
          I believe it was William Jennings Bryant who stated something like "You shall not hang the nation on a cross of gold", or something like that...


          If I remember my early 20th century history correctly (and I might not), Bryant wanted free and unlimited minting of money. This would have made it easier for farmers (his chief supporters) to pay off their debts (small farmers then had the same problems as small farmers now), but would have made inflation rampant.


          Bryant would have wanted these microbes because his understanding of economics sucked. His understanding of evolution sucked, too (he was part of the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial). Hell of a public speaker, though


          -jon

    • Actually, gold has not been an important factor in the global economy for about thirty years now. The amount of gold in the world is a drop in the bucket by comparison to the amount of money in circulation, as evidenced by the fact that even in the 1930s the gold supply simply could not keep up with the need of governments to expand the money supply. Since the values of currency are no longer tied to gold, gold is a commodity, like iron or copper. If a lot of gold is injected into the world economy, hte price of gold will plummet (gold prices have also been sinking for years anyway), and that will be about the end of the global effect. As drops in commodity price are usually good for hte economy, I would suggest the psycho with a beef against the world look elsewhere. If this rich psycho really wanted to screw with the global economy, he could find a way to print billions in bogus US dollars. It would wreak havoc on hte US economy, not to mention the economies of the other nations whose currencies are tied to the dollar.

  • "You couldn't use this process to harvest the gold from the ocean. The cost in pumping the water would be more than how much gold you could recover,"

    You could use windenergy in order to pump the water or make use of the meganism of the tides.

    • Or, you could sell the energy generated by your wind/tide machine and make even more money. You would have to process a very large amount of water to get even a small quantity of gold. The value of the power you could generate would probably be greater than the small amount of gold you would find.

  • Nitpicky (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jobby ( 135237 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @07:59PM (#2241762) Homepage

    Incidentally, Arthur C. Clarke wrote about using genetically engineered coral to extract gold from seawater in his 1975 book "Imperial Earth". However, the coral were extremely fragile, and eventually were only maintained as a curiosity.


    Jobby

  • If somone could figure out how to selectively [demon.co.uk] extract precious metals out of this mess [mtech.edu] we wouldn't need another hard rock mine in the US for a LONG time, plus our watershed [epa.gov] may still have some hope; its probably too late [clarkfork.org] though. The sad part is that, our leaders [discoveringmontana.com] are more interested in sucking corporate [scn.org] dick while the taxpayers cover defaulted reclamation bonds [nwsource.com]. This place [discoveringmontana.com] could be a really great place if there were only some accountibility.


  • Will they be going IPO soon? Can I get a loan?
  • It isn't as cool as when Dr. Honeydew and Beaker on The Muppets changed solid gold into cottage cheese. That ladies and gentleman, is progress!

  • Paranoid Thought (Score:2, Insightful)

    by m_evanchik ( 398143 )
    What if gold is essential for some unknown process in the seas? Maybe mining the gold will have some unpleasant side effects. I often wonder this same thing when I think about mining asteroids for precious metals. What if some proto-virus is brought back, a la "The Andromeda Strain".

    Admittedly, this is far-fetched, but I imagine that even an inert substance like gold must affect the ecosystem, But then again, Maybe the amount that would be extracted is still tiny compared to the sea-water reserves. How much gold is in that water?
    • Well, we know gold is necessary for at least one process in the ocean. These bacteria "breathe" it don't they...? (gold metal is inert, but Au3+ in solution probably isn't)
      • This kind of reminds me when I heard of the petroleum-eating bacteria that would be used to clean up oil spills. I always wondered if they might feast to much on the oil and end up in the actual reserves.

        Ever seen gypsy-moths feast on a forest?
  • Microorganisms brought out from the jungles have and are causing health problems in people. I wonder about things that eat metals around hydrothermic vents. A bug that consumes a trace metal would probably do much damage if it could survive in blood. The multiplication of disease vectors worries me.
  • Heard about this on the way to work.

    Seems that they are looking at these critters for extraction of Radioactive material in water for nuclear cleanups at Hanford and Rocky Flats. I recall they can pretty much work with any metal, and they think that these guys are the reason there were/are gold/silver flakes in river and stream beds.

    If I rember it right, and since I can't get on the link...thats all I have...you get these things going in a pond with radioactive sediments after a while they'll accumulate big enough flakes that you can strain it out.

    There is talk about using them on the piles (cubic miles) of debris from gold and silver mines like Homestake and the mines in Colorado and California, as well as cleaning up copper mines in Montana, Wyoming and Utah.

  • ... to think of harvesting metals for profit, instead researching the potential to de-toxify the environment, or even an organism that suffers from metal poisoning.

    Granted, gold is extremely harmless to humans when ingested (relative to lead and mercury), but still...
  • In Bester's The Computer Connection (called Extro in the UK) a guy is extracting gold from seawater and trying to give it to artists in the past who died of impoverishment.

  • How to make a goldfish. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Futurepower(tm) ( 228467 ) <M_Jennings @ not ... futurepower.org> on Saturday September 01, 2001 @02:38AM (#2242410) Homepage
    'You couldn't use this process to harvest the gold from the ocean. The cost in pumping the water would be more than how much gold you could recover," he said. The gold particles excreted by the microbes are so tiny it would take about a million microbes to produce a gram of solid gold.'

    Duh! It takes about 10 minutes for microbes to divide to make a million.

    You design a slightly larger organism to eat these microbes.

    Then, you design a fish that eats the slightly larger organism.

    Then you have a goldfish! It's easy.

    • Oh yeah, and I forgot to say that you release the young fish from the inside of an empty bank vault at the top of a stream.

      The fish are genetically engineered to be like salmon, so they come back to where they were born. When they come back, heavy with gold, you just close the vault doors.

  • Metals from seawater NOT science fiction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mike Greaves ( 1236 ) on Saturday September 01, 2001 @07:39AM (#2242711) Homepage
    Metals have been produced from seawater for decades, and very economically, too. There are several which can be practically produced this way. But of that group, the only common *structural* metal which I can think of is Magnesium.

    Magnesium hydroxide can be cheaply extracted from brine by precipitation when a cheap alkali is added - usually slaked lime (calcium hydroxide). The magnesium hydroxide becomes the feedstock for electrolytic cells which produce metallic magnesium. This second step is similar to the way that metallic aluminum is produced from aluminum hydroxide, after it is refined from bauxite. At one time, most of the world's magnesium was produced this way, though it may or may not be now - there are other practical sources. It is sufficient to say that the cost of electrolysis for magnesium production greatly outweighs the cost of the hydroxide feedstock, regardless of the source.

    Uranium can also be produced from seawater, by various methods, but the cost is very much higher than either current world prices (very low right now) or even historical peak prices. It *is* however, *definitely* not too expensive for breeder reactor usage (breeders yield ~100 times more energy per unit mass of natural uranium). And there is something like 500 - 1000 times more uranium dissolved in seawater than all current, proven reserves in conventional mines.

    In addition, I believe several other, non-structural metals are or can be produced from seawater. Rubidium, cesium, strontium, barium are perhaps possible. The amounts available is *usually* vastly larger than mine reserves.

    Clearly, calling metal extraction from seawater "science fiction" is quite inappropriate.
  • After the first world war Germany had to pay huge reparation costs. So, Fritz Haber tried to extract the gold from the sea water. Sounds ludicrous? Maybe, but IMHO it sounds even more ludicrous to create fertilizer from gases contained in the air - until you hear that Haber and Bosch did just that.
  • Who cares if you can't make any fair amount of Gold usig them, patent them, and make everyone else pay you! Just tell them the microbes were harvested in your IT department.
  • Now I can just pop a pill and all that wasted gold from Goldschlager can be ejected as a nifty keen solid gold nugget!

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