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 Replies: 14 / Views: 3,549 |
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Pillar of the Community
Canada
862 Posts |
Gold-pooping bacteria could be modern day equivalent of the Philosopher's stone The bacteria, Cupriavidus metallidurans, is able to consume the naturally-occurring toxic chemical gold chloride, and produce nuggets of 99.9% gold as a waste product. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/geek...3240759.html |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3670 Posts |
Very interesting, but seeing as how if ingested it will kill you I fail to see how it could have any relevancy. Minus a new cloned (  ) cow with enzymes in stomach that could handle the toxicity  and result in some uuuuuuum REGENERERATED gold waste nuggets  ..... I would buy them at just under spot price for the manure odor/factor  .... Edited by Silverhawk74
10/04/2012 5:32 pm
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1903 Posts |
There was a somewhat related story about twenty years ago where scientist found that banana trees were good at up taking gold from the soil. So they planted groves of them in south america where there was trace levels of gold in the soil too low to commercially mine out. They used the banana trees to concentrate the gold within the plant tissues and then at the end of the year...incinerated the entire plants. The banana trees had concentrated the gold enough that it made for a cost effective way to "mine" gold! Wish I could find the reference to it but it seems to long ago to have made it online.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
2764 Posts |
That's very interesting, unholyroller. But that mean it would take 1-2yrs to harvest the banana plants.... and they would need large lot of land..... I would be interested in reading the actual article.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1903 Posts |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
6384 Posts |
Some of the large gold deposits in South Africa are the result of algae that concentrated gold atoms from the seawater. I remember photomicrographs that showed the gold arranged in long strands that corresponded to the shape of the original algae cell.
Ain't biology cool!
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Moderator
 Australia
16816 Posts |
I have no idea where this yahoo got his facts from, but maybe he should have asked a chemist. Quote:
The latest cost of a gram of gold in Canadian dollars, is $56.53, and depending on where you get it, you can buy gold chloride for about $25-30 a gram (or substantially less if you're willing to buy it by the metric ton), so it might be economically feasible to make money doing this How do you think they make gold chloride, laddie? It isn't "naturally occuring", except dissolved in minute quantities in seawater which aren't economically viable to extract. Nor is it a major component of mine spoil or mine waste. They have to make gold chloride (more properly known as chloroauric acid, HAuCl 4) from gold, by dissolving it in aqua regia. Nobody makes this stuff and sells it for a loss. It simply isn't that cheap. I just checked the price on Sigma-Aldrich; it's $44/gram right now. Any sensible chemical supplier would have raised their prices, in line with the gold price. The "cheap stuff", if it exists, is probably wet and/or contaminated, which would reduce your yield. And even if you did find a source of pure dry chloroauric acid that cheap, he doesn't seem to know that for every 100 grams of chloroauric acid you start with, you can only make 57 grams of pure gold. That's not an efficiency thing that could be improved, it's simple chemistry; a theoretical maximum. There aren't tons of chloroauric acid just sitting around, waiting for someone to discover a means of turning it into gold. There's already a perfectly viable means: electroplating. The Wohlwill process, used in gold refineries, uses a chloroauric acid solution. The only possible use I can see these bugs having is in a gold-from-seawater scheme. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3546 Posts |
Quote:
maybe he should have asked a chemist informative and accurate |
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Valued Member
United States
456 Posts |
Thanks Sap! Information like this is why I read this forum every day.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4008 Posts |
OK, since you asked... lol Quote:
It isn't "naturally occuring", except dissolved in minute quantities in seawater which aren't economically viable to extract. Actually, there very well might be a way to do this economically. There are many ion-exchange resins available and specialty ones can be made in addition to the ones that are already available. It might be possible to create one that has an affinity for dissolved gold ions, such as via a -CN moiety on the resin. Then, pump MANY gallons of sea water through the resin bed to collect the gold. Once the resin is saturated, decouple the gold from the resin, probably via a water wash of the right pH, precipitate out the gold for purification / processing, and recycle the resin. To be anywhere near economical, a lot of the energy needed for pumping seawater would have to come from solar and/or wave action electrical generators. At some point, this will probably be tied in with other chemical reactions such that a heavy brine solution and potable water can be collected in different containers. This would give drinking water for parched places or irrigation water for farmers from one side of the process and a heavy salt solution from the other side. Using electrolysis, it should be possible to recover various metals from the brine, including gold and silver. There would be a halogen waste stream to deal with that could be a significant problem, though. There would be a political problem with "desalting" the oceans as well. |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
979 Posts |
Started reading second post, had vision of cow pooping gold nuggets......
didn't expect to ever have that image
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Valued Member
United States
242 Posts |
In one of the first computer games I worked on early on the only 'object' that moved, was a cow but we wanted to test the iron mining and having the iron ore pile deplete. So I wrote a script that made a cow poop iron ore. Does that count? . Maybe I should have used lead then we could turn it into gold.... |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3670 Posts |
The tech for turning saltwater into drinking water is pretty simple eh, and always existed.....
The machines on carries do it, and I imagine with a similar ion charged or filter process. A friend of mine had a contract job painting them years back...
No doubt after watching the two shows on gold in the Barring sea, via the summer and winter time ice dredging operations, there is MUCH gold in the oceans. But because it is so heavy, it always settles in the deepest cracks of certain type of rock beds it seems, making it tougher to extract....
They lose much gold out the back end of their sleuth boxes when they are not leveled to the exact millimeter, so a ion charge which collects it could be very useful in that sense as well....
I saw the two survivor guys, via the hippie and the soldier. Cody and Dave perhaps. Anyhow Cody is sharp as a tack scientifically speaking and on an island he made a device with copper tubing where he in essence was cooking sea water until the pressure forced it up through the tubes and when it dripped out the other side it was of course drinkable salt free water....
He was turning the water to steam in the pipe seems like, then wrapped cool wet rags around the pipe which forced the steam to condense back into water perhaps....
Edited by Silverhawk74
10/07/2012 2:49 pm
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4008 Posts |
Quote:
The tech for turning saltwater into drinking water is pretty simple eh, and always existed..... Only if you are referring to boiling it and condensing the steam, Hawk. That's been around for a LONG time. Ion exchange resins are a much more recent invention. Not sure what process carriers use but it could be ion exchange to remove salts and then some sort of purification process, such as chlorination + filtering. It could also be some sort of osmosis membrane technology that selectively allows water to pass through the membrane but not the larger salt molecules. |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3670 Posts |
Yes exactly Ed, I was saying the process Cody did on the Island would have always been feasible, minus the fact that the ancient world would have had no copper pipes. But maybe they could have been many other ways to achieve the same goal perhaps....
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Replies: 14 / Views: 3,549 |
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Posted 10/04/2012 5:53 pm
