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. […]
Tag: gold
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 […]