Chinese Scientists create process to turn Copper into 'Gold'

I agree, that's why I said 'Gold' - it's not gold, it just is an attempt at replicating some of the best industrial aspects of it.

I too wonder how you 'densify' an electron...

<big IIUC warning>

They are using sputtering that is a method that use a big spark to remove some Cooper atom from a surface and put the atoms in another surface. (You can use other metals instead of Cooper too.)

The deposited Cooper atoms are not in the standard environment that they is use to be, like in a big Cooper metal block. So they attach to the surface in a weird configuration.

In the new configuration, the elections don't have the usual distribution (like the electrons in the atoms of a metal Cooper bar). Anyway, the atoms of Cooper here don't have more or less electrons that usual, so they are still "metallic" with some definition.

In the new rearrangement, the electrons are more densely packed. If you use the (wrong) Borh atom model, some of them have an orbit that is closer to the center than usual. With the correct quantum model, the idea is that some of the inner orbitals are usually empty, but here one of the electrons that is usually in an outer orbital falls into this usually empty orbital.

(It's much more complicated, because the orbitals are not static and they are rearranged in each configuratio, and the orbitals are not a totally clear concept when you consider the quantum effect of correlation, but let's keep this simple.)

So the new configuration is more compact, because one electron that is usually in an outer orbital is now in a inner orbital.

The outer electron was easy to attack by other chemical substances. This gives Cooper some of it's usual properties. With the new configuration, it's more difficult to attack the electron, so the atoms have some (at least one) property that is similar to the properties of Gold.

In particular, this property is useful to bound some Carbon atoms and help them react, so they can produce alcohol from carbon (and water and energy?).

</big IIUC warning>

Nothing ever does.

I thought they primarily viewed gold as valuable because it's a medium of exchange that they believe will remain useful and stable in case of some sort of societal collapse? There probably won't be a lot of microelectronics getting manufactured in that scenario; gold prices dropping ought to be good for them now.