Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia | Hacker News Reader

Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia

cnn.com

58 pointsgwomble23 comments

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Well, 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.

Well, first of all, bark doesn't just exist in free form in the ground and get moved to the tree, it's synthesized from the CO2 in the air (I'm no plantologist, so this may be overly simplified).

However, the difference isn't in the "grow" part, it's in the "gold" part. If you tell someone "I've found a plant that grows gold", their reaction won't be "wow, what an interesting mechanism", it will be "holy shit, we're rich!".

If you want apples, you plant an apple tree, then you grow apples for free. By that analogy, if you want gold, you plant one of these trees, and get gold for free, which doesn't hold, because you'll never get more gold than how much you put in.

> By that analogy, if you want gold, you plant one of these trees, and get gold for free, which doesn't hold, because you'll never get more gold than how much you put in.

This isn't true, in the same way that it's not true that a gold mine will never give you any more gold than you put into the mine in the first place. There's already gold in the ground.

That's why we don't say that a gold mine grows gold.

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?

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

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...

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

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.

Mustard plants are the ones that readily come to mind; apparently it's called phytoremediation.

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

Bacteria are already being used to extract economically significant amounts of metals from ore bodies and mine waste.

ATW, up to 25% of the world's supply of new copper is now produced this way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining

That Wikipedia article is the least-sourced one I've seen in years. It has one cite, from "June 1994". Not to contradict you, and I'm sure that biomining is important, but I thought it was interesting to see a Wikipedia article like that. Biomining must not be a controversial topic!

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.

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...

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

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

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

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