Check out this link.
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
That's fascinating.
Posted by Audeo (Member # 5130) on :
I wonder if this can be extrapolated further so that the metals in the plants would be absorbed by the animals that eat them. If so animals that eat large amount of plant matter, and live a long time, like elephants or hippos, may have deposits of such metals as well. That would just be cool.
Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :
Like the goose eats the golden alfalfa, then lays a golden egg?
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
It is quite possible to extract gold from most sources of groundwater. I built a water trap from a kit that I bought at www.wildsideplus.com that can trap the "oil of gold".
Posted by HollowEarth (Member # 2586) on :
Like they said this is old news, its been part of bioremediation for a while. Using biological systems to produce nanoparticles is also been done for a while. Bacteria that can live in high concentrations of cadmium have been used to synthesize quantum dots.
When you cause a quantum dot to emit light, the wavelength of the light is proportional to the size of the particle. Bacteria that sequester Cd die when the amount of bound Cd reaches a certain amount. Dots produced in this fashion are generally more uniform in size than dots produced by other methods, because of this die off.
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
It's important to note that the "quackery" here comes not in the existence of colloids -- which is actual scientific fact -- but in the common belief that they possess unusual powers. (See the above links for examples.)
![[Angst]](graemlins/angst.gif)