The Alchemist by Marcel Lorange
For years, alchemists tried to turn lead into gold for a get-rich-quick scheme with lead being the obvious choice because it has the same weight as gold.
Now, scientists have changed the color of gold from, well, gold to purple. Why though? Because they wanted to see what kind of energy they can harvest from the sun so they mixed gold particles, citric acid and protein and exposed it to light.
If it turned purple, that would signal that the gold atoms had received electrons and used the donated energy to bunch together as small, purple-colored nanoparticles. And that would mean that the protein used the sunlight to excite the citric acid and trigger a transfer of energy.
So it did turn purple, but what all this means may be too early to tell. Now will purple gold be a new fashion trend?
Jewelry Inspired (and Designed) by Nature
PHOTOS: All Our Friends on Flickr are Fabulous Cross Dressers
FOFA #729 – The Golden Standard – 09.01.08
8 Comments
Comments
I seem to recall a test like this being used on an ep of House MD, only it used something called stannous chloride, to determine that a woman was poisoning her husband with gold. Honestly, the things some gals waste money on…
This is a relatively common area of research now. I have a lot of friends who do this work. Most of them deal with color changes and gold or silver nanoparticles. Only nanoparticles of gold act in this way. So, even if the nanoparticles did turn gold, the gold particles would lose that property if you collected too many of them together and they no longer existed as separate sets of nanoparticles. They’re neat though, and highly reactive. Also, some are different shades of pink.