5 ms·
Why gold loves arsenic (2021)
- OutOfHere 2y agoSo what you are saying is that fool's gold isn't totally foolish.
- memorydial 2y agoRight? Turns out fool’s gold has a bit of wisdom after all. It won’t make you rich, but in the right conditions, it can help concentrate the real stuff!
- labster 2y agoWith this sympathy between gold and arsenic discovered, we’re one step closer to the philosopher’s stone.
- Terr_ 2y agoThales of Miletus already made one, but it turned out to just be water.
- fjjjrjj 2y agoIt loves mercury too which is also toxic. Interesting.
- ggm 2y agoBut mercury-gold amalgam, maybe different chemistry at play?
- adrian_b 2y agoMetallic gold alloys easily with mercury, so it can be dissolved by mercury. It also alloys easily, i.e. it is dissolved, with other liquid metals, e.g. silver, copper, indium etc., but that is less obvious than with mercury, because those metals must first be heated to great temperatures, to become liquid, before dissolving gold. The relation with arsenic is different. It is an affinity between ionic gold and arsenic, not between metallic gold and arsenic. The gold ions are very big, among the biggest metallic ions. Because of that, the gold ions have great affinity only for some big anions (negative ions), i.e. for the ions of arsenic or of tellurium, which have approximately the same size. This is in contrast with the smaller ions of silver and copper, which have great affinity with the smaller anions of sulfur. It is well known that the gold ions have the greatest affinity for the anions of the size of arsenic and tellurium. Tellurium has an even greater affinity for gold than arsenic, but tellurium is extremely rare at the surface of the Earth. Due to the rarity of tellurium, even if minerals with gold and tellurium are well known they are less frequently found than those were gold is associated with arsenic. While the maximal affinity of gold with tellurium and arsenic has been well known, this research has elucidated details of the mechanism how this creates arsenical minerals rich in gold, which may help in the prospection for such minerals. Because gold is normally much more scarce in the environment than arsenic and than other metals with which arsenic combines easily, the minerals with arsenic and gold are seldom straightforward combinations of arsenic and gold, but as explained in the article, gold infiltrates arsenides of other metals (usually of iron, whose arsenide is the most abundant).
- pfdietz 2y agoIn Kalgoorlie, Australia, gold telluride was not recognized as such, but was instead misidentified as pyrite and was used as a paving material. The streets were literally paved with gold (since recovered).
- zdragnar 2y agoMercury loves lots of metals. NileRed has some fantastic videos playing around with the stuff on YouTube
- refurb 2y agoIt also loves cyanide. Which is why it's used to leach gold in mining.
- ggm 2y agoHaving panned for gold in Gympie I was convinced I'd come home with a lot of pyrites and now 30 years later I feel I need to revisit that tiny jar of yellow dust. (Got a killer dose of sunburn just above the bum crack bending over in the stream with my pan, a reminder sunscreen has to go EVERYWHERE.)
- stavros 2y agoNot everywhere, just everywhere the sun shines.
- nobodyandproud 2y agoTMI
- kcplate 2y agoI found it a helpful tip quite honestly.
- kazinator 2y agoIf you have lots of gold, have your food tested for arsenic.
- flashfaffe2 2y agoGenuine question for an outsider: would this imply that gold can be created? My memories from the last chemistry class I had, I clearly remember my teacher demonstrating philosopher stone ( aka changing materials in gold ) was feasible.
- somebodynew 2y agoThis article is about arsenic minerals acting like a sponge that holds and concentrates gold from the surrounding environment that it comes in contact with. It isn't creating new atoms of gold. Gold can be created through an unrelated process of nuclear transmutation, but it's impractically expensive [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...
- memorydial 2y agoNope, this doesn’t create gold, just helps existing gold accumulate in certain conditions. Actual gold creation requires nuclear reactions, which are technically possible but not practical.
- pfdietz 2y agoMaybe not as impractical as you think. Gold could be made by neutron capture on Hg-196. This is a rare isotope, so doing so would require two things: cheap neutrons, and a cheap way to enrich that isotope. Helion's FRC scheme could provide the first if operated on DD (even if just at engineering breakeven). As for the latter, there's a scheme that's been proposed for mercury isotope separation that exploits the change in magnetic moment of mercury atoms when they are optically excited. This would use radiation from a mercury lamp that itself uses isotopically separated mercury to produce radiation that would selectively excite just that isotope, and steer the atoms in a beam using a magnetic track. (This isotope separation technique has been proposed as a way to make fluorescent lights more efficient by reducing UV photon trapping in mercury vapor.) The world's mercury production is low enough and this isotope rare enough that this wouldn't affect gold prices.
- Tuna-Fish 2y ago
- memorydial 2y agoFascinating read! So if arsenic helps gold concentrate in deposits, does this mean arsenic-rich environments are better places to prospect? Or is it more about how existing deposits form rather than finding new ones?
- metalman 2y agoquick search on "arsenic in water" yields endless official governmental and other notices all over the world, so there does not apear to be a direct asosiation between (recoverable) gold and arsenic and that it is so prevelant that some humans have adapted and pass arsenic. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/centuries-poison-laced-water-gave-these-people-tolerance-arsenic-180954491/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/centuries-poison-l...