
Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia - gwomble
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/world/gold-growing-on-trees/index.html
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iamshs
[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131022/ncomms3614/full/ncomms3614.html)

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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

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pom
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.

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unwind
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?

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

~~~
thaumasiotes
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.

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StavrosK
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> 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.

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

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femto
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...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-tree-
leaves/5039226)

[2] [http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Gilding-the-gum-tree-
scien...](http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Gilding-the-gum-tree-scientists-
strike-gold-in-leaves.aspx)

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

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

~~~
ekianjo
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.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Mustard plants are the ones that readily come to mind; apparently it's called
phytoremediation.

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fblp
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...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/an-gold-found-in-gum-tree-
leaves/5039226)

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sjg007
"See Dad... money does grow on trees!"

~~~
sjg007
Wow... must be a lot of Dad's on HN! :(

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

