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Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia
- iamshs 13y agohttp://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/ncomms3614.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/nco... The study is remarkable in the sense that they for the first time proved a definite link that eucalyptus trees in fact imbibe gold ore from the earth, and theorized the mechanism behind it.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI think they came up with the wrong use case though. What you'd really like is to have a gengeneered bacteria that extracts gold out of solution and can live in salt water. And some phytoplankton or arthropods that eat the bacteria and concentrate metallic salts in a kidney like organ. which are then collectable with drag nets. All new gold mining industry :-) One wonders though if there are plants in the Sierras that would be similar processors of dissolved gold.
- sjg007 13y ago"See Dad... money does grow on trees!"
- sjg007 13y agoWow... must be a lot of Dad's on HN! :(
- fblp 13y agoVideo of the researchers explaining how this happens and how the gold can be detected: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-tree-leaves/5039226 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-t...
- femto 13y agoFurther to the article, and before you chop down trees to obtain the gold, the concentrations of gold mentioned equate to 500 trees containing enough gold to make a wedding ring [1]. Also links to CSIRO's media release [2] and the paper [3]. [1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-tree-leaves/5039226 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-t... [2] http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Gilding-the-gum-tree-scientists-strike-gold-in-leaves.aspx http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Gilding-the-gum-tree-scien... [3] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/ncomms3614.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/nco...
- PakG1 13y agoThat's really unfortunate. I was having visions of literal gold farming becoming a viable real-life vocation. :) 500 trees per ring is probably too inefficient to make it worthwhile.
- vincie 13y agoGenetic modification to the rescue! Would be even more valuable if they can do it for toxic metals like arsenic and mercury.
- ekianjo 13y agoI'm not sure where I read it, but I do remember that plants such as broccoli and similar species can suck out heavy metals from the ground. Not sure how much or how fast, though.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoMustard plants are the ones that readily come to mind; apparently it's called phytoremediation.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoResearch has already been done on phytoremediation of heavy metals using mustard plants and bioaccumulation with various species of fungi.
- pom 13y agoTFA is an example of how to improve the quality of about any newspaper or magazine article: ignore the first and last sentence (or at worst paragraph.) Here, they both repeat that “money does grow on tree”, where the rest of the article describes how the gold is not grown by the tree, but extracted from the soil, thus contradicting the moronic introduction and conclusion.
- xerophtye 13y agoYeah, feels like the first and second paragraphs were the author's own understanding of it, and the rest are copy-pasted :/
- unwind 13y agoI totally agree about the annoyingness of the intro/outro, but what is the difference in your opinion between things being "grown by the tree" and "extracted from the soil"? Isn't that all trees (and, dare I say it, most other living organisms) do: extract atoms from the soil (and the surrounding air, of course), and grow themselves from those?
- StavrosK 13y agoThe difference is that they don't synthesize the gold, just move it. Gold grows on trees like apples grow on a shopper.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoWell, gold is an element. By this standard, the only way to describe something as "growing" gold would be if it produced it by nuclear fusion. There's an alternative perspective... the trees are growing gold in the same way that leaves, bark, hair, claws, etc. are grown. Anything a tree does could be described as "growing". The fact that they leave the gold in the same state they get it doesn't really bear on the fact that growing is what trees do. If, hypothetically, I created a rose breed that naturally gilded its own petals, I guarantee that everyone would describe that as "growing". But they still wouldn't be synthesizing the gold, just moving it. Your intuitions have gone astray somewhere. Now, the things I listed as examples of things that are grown are all somewhat discrete entities, which is also true of my hypothetical self-gilding roses and is not true of the gold in this article. But synthesizing gold doesn't come into it.
- yeukhon 13y agoInteresting. One theory is some people will literally just chop down a tree and if how much gold they could extract from it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]