Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/world/gold-growing-on-trees/index.html

by gwomble • 13 years ago

58 23 13 years ago

iamshs• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

I 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.

sjg0072• 13 years ago

"See Dad... money does grow on trees!"

sjg0072• 13 years ago

Wow... must be a lot of Dad's on HN! :(

fblp• 13 years ago

Video 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-t...

femto• 13 years ago

Further 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-t...

[2] http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Gilding-the-gum-tree-scien...

[3] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/nco...

PakG1• 13 years ago

That'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• 13 years ago

Genetic modification to the rescue! Would be even more valuable if they can do it for toxic metals like arsenic and mercury.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

I'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.

Wingman4l72• 13 years ago

Research has already been done on phytoremediation of heavy metals using mustard plants and bioaccumulation with various species of fungi.

pom• 13 years ago

TFA 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• 13 years ago

Yeah, feels like the first and second paragraphs were the author's own understanding of it, and the rest are copy-pasted :/

unwind• 13 years ago

I 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?

StavrosK3• 13 years ago

The difference is that they don't synthesize the gold, just move it. Gold grows on trees like apples grow on a shopper.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Is there some sort of class at j-school where they teach prospective journalists how to use hackneyed phrases and horrible puns? Is it a signaling mechanism to show other journalists they're part of the club?

yeukhon• 13 years ago

Interesting. One theory is some people will literally just chop down a tree and if how much gold they could extract from it.

Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia

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