Is it a good idea to eat gold (in the form of gold leaf)? Prof. Koichi Imai, D.D.S., Ph.D of the Dept. of Biomaterials, Osaka Dental University, Japan (and other places), is of the opinion that the answer might well be ‘no’. Pointing out that although : “Gold leaf flakes are considered to pass through the […]
Tag: gold
Olympic Gold Medalists Die Earlier (than Silver Medalists) [new study]
When it comes to Gold and Silver medalists in Olympic Track and Field events between 1896 and 1948, then : “Contrary to conventional wisdom, winners die over one year earlier than losers.” That’s the result of a new research project conducted by Professor Adam Leive of the Batten School of Leadership & Public Policy, University […]
Gold-digging ants – an(other) explanation
“In northern India there is a sandy desert and in this desert there live large ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes. A few ants that have been caught there may be seen at the king of Persia’s place. When digging their holes these ants throw out soil just like the ants in Greece […]
Gold Nuggety? (Nugus, and yes, Cleverley, and then some)
How to recognize gold that’s nuggety, amidst the rabble of planet earth? This study makes a suggestion: “Using Geochemical Proxies to Model Nuggety Gold Deposits: An example from Sunrise Dam, Western Australia,” E. June Hill [pictured here], Nicholas H.S. Oliver, Louise Fisher, James S. Cleverley, Michael J. Nugus, Journal of Geochemical Exploration, epub May 24, […]
“The Gold Bug” [fictional], and the real bug that accumulates gold
In 1843, Edgar Allen Poe wrote a fictional story called “The Gold Bug,” about a bug made of gold. In 2012, Aaron Stewart, Ravi Anand and Jens Balkau wrote a scientific treatise about termites that accumulate gold in their nest: “Source of anomalous gold concentrations in termite nests, Moolart Well, Western Australia: implications for exploration,” Aaron D. […]
How gold wedding rings go missing abrasively
A gold wedding band symbolises permanence, but bits of it disappear as a marriage endures, scraping against the marital skin every moment that metal and finger convene. Georg Steinhauser, a chemist at Vienna University of Technology, calculated how much goes missing, how quickly and at what cost. Steinhauser’s study, Quantification of the Abrasive Wear of a Gold Wedding […]
Nobel Medals, Dissolved and Bottled
Stephan Schwartz writes, in the magazine Gamma: In an autobiographical essay, George de Hevesy (1943 Nobel Laureate) writes: ”My work was interrupted only one day during the enemy occupation of Denmark. When, in the morning of Denmark’s occupation [9 April 1940], I arrived in the laboratory, I found Bohr worrying about Max von Laue’s Nobel […]