It’s been a bad couple of weeks for priceless artifacts from NASA history. First, a moon-dusted sample bag from Apollo 11 was privately auctioned, and now a solid gold moon lander replica that was gifted to Neil Armstrong in 1969 has been stolen from his museum. On Sunday, a NASA investigator worried that the thieves…
Let’s be perfectly clear on this. Gold-plating anything, be it a phone, or a toilet, or a smartwatch, is a terrible and tacky idea. But gold-plating a drone is even worse, and it has nothing to do with aesthetics.
That little bead right there? That’s all the gold in four and a half pounds of electronics waste. And it took so very much work to get there.
Metallurgist Grigory Raykhtsaum shows Smithsonian three different ways to test if something is solid gold: a color test, a thermal conductivity test, and a particle test. It’s all computerized now so all he has to do is scan the object to get a read on the color, zap it with an electrical current to measure the…
Gold is so malleable that a single gram of it can be stretched into a strip nearly two miles long. A tiny little coin can be pressed into a 0.0001-millimeter-thin golden rectangular sheet the size of a tatami mat. So leave it to the talented artisans of Japan to transform a tiny bit of gold into shimmering gold leaf…
Over the last year, Apple processed 90 million pounds of electronics that were unwanted or broken. It turns out they were nearly worth their weight in gold—a substance which is used heavily in electronics for its conductivity and resistance to corrosion.
This is the least dense gold nugget in the entire world. It can be held up with a feather. And it’s supported by a space-age material often dubbed “frozen smoke.”
Where does gold come from? The answer: space, basically. Supernovae, specifically. Alchemy, sort of. So gold doesn’t actually originate from the core of Earth but actually from a star explosion that showers the universe with debris and well, gold. That means there’s not that much of it actually on Earth (all the gold…
Android Wear watches are cool and all, but none of them are especially fancy. (Even the new Moto 360, with its flat tire screen.) Until now, at least. An alligator leather wristband, 23-karat gold plating, and a $1000-plus price tag mean the LG Watch Urbane Luxe is a particularly niche geek accessory.
Believe it or not, when you suspend gold in water, it can turn a lilac-blue color. You just need the right amount of salt. And plasmons. See samples of this blue-gold liquid, and learn how a famously warm material can turn cool.
We’ll believe it when we see it, but two men, one a Pole and one a German, say they know the location of a heavily armored Nazi train that was rumored to be hidden away in a tunnel during the dying days of the Second World War—a train that could contain upwards of 300 tons of gold.
Starting today, you can buy a gold iPod Touch. It’s actually not as lame as it sounds. Beneath its golden shell, the iPod is starting to look a little bit like the low-cost phones that so many of its competitors are working on, too.
Finding gold in Boeslunde, Denmark, is no huge surprise—it’s known as an area where Bronze Age gold offering are often uncovered, as curators there are explaining this month. But a recent discovery has surprised and baffled archaeologists: 2,000 tiny gold spirals. It’s a “golden enigma.”
If you want to find out what’s unusual about chloroauric acid, look at the “Au” in the middle. It indicates that this is an acid made using gold. We’ll tell you why people make this acid, and how it can hurt you.
Back in 1904, placer miners combed the Shoshone River for any trace of precious metals. With gold and silver found nearby, long days and hard work sorting through stream deposits had the chance of paying off big.
One of the reasons I desperately want to time travel is to blow the minds of people in the past with just the simplest of things today. Imagine going back hundreds of years and baking this gold 24 'carrot' cake. With a few drops of food coloring and a few edible gold leaf sheets, I'd be hailed as the greatest…
The picture above is terrible. It shows the catastrophic effects of the deforestation caused by the current gold rush in the tropical forests of South America. The consumption of gold worldwide is increasing in the last years due to the global economic crisis and the instability in the financial markets.
As far as Apple announcements go, today's "Spring Forward" event was decidedly lacking in big reveals. The only real curveball was Apple's reveal of a brand new MacBook—one that comes in both gold and space gray, no less. Still, there were some fun little surprises thrown in the mix.
Nearly half the gold ever mined comes from the Witwatersrand Basin, a layer of gold-flecked rock that spreads out under South Africa. The mines there are famously deep and prolific. Why is there so much gold concentrated in this one small part of the Earth's crust?
There's gold in them thar sewers—and silver and platinum and copper, too. A study by Arizona State University (ASU) researchers estimates there is $13 million worth of precious elements in the sewage produced by a million-person city every year. Never think of sewage as stinky worthless waste again.
