Yesterday I talked about the "gold bug," the little cupriavidus metallidurans bacterium that literally eats toxic metals and poops out 24 karat gold. There, I raised the possibility that such a phenomenon represented an alchemical technology that, with "enough money and manpower" could be turned to more industrial scale "production." As I also noted in yesterday's blog, such a technology would likely have been developed in secret, since to admit it openly would collapse the price of gold, whereas a secret deployment of it would allow the creation of secret reserves as a backing for a whole … [Read more...]