February 16, 2021 • 45 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the nature of gold, humanity’s history extracting it from the Earth and the amazing properties of gold nanoparticles.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you kind of a
grab bag episode that was inspired by an email we
(00:21):
got from a listener not too long ago. It was
from a listener named Kate who wrote in to tell
us about how she works sometimes in uh I forget
exactly what kind of laboratory it was, but that she
works sometimes with nanoparticles like gold nanoparticles in the lab
and suggested that we look into doing an episode on
gold and gold nanoparticles. And we were like, hey, that
(00:42):
sounds interesting. So today we're rolling out the buffet card
of of gold, gold nanoparticles and things that struck us
as interesting. Yeah. So, um, first of all, I do
want to mention an earlier episode. This was not that
long ago, actually just from July. We need an episode
titled The Tide of Old, which ultimately had to do
(01:03):
with a con I believe right, Yeah, I thought that
was a fun episode. It was actually about a a
scam that was run by a clergyman named Prescott Joern.
Again at a against a community on the coast of
Maine in the late eighteen nineties. Thing it was, and
he pretended that he had created a machine that would
(01:24):
be able to extract endless quantities of gold from the
sea water. And he did this whole thing like that.
The scam was quite elaborate. He bought, uh, he bought
some local property on the coast and and set up
a fake processing facility and hired tons of people and
got all these investors and then eventually just skipped down
(01:44):
with the money. But then we talked about how he
actually wasn't the last person to try to extract gold
from the sea. There had been real attempts to extract
gold from the sea, and there is actually uh an
appreciable amount of gold in the sea water, but the
actual atempts to build factories to extract it have always
proved that it costs more to get the gold out
(02:07):
than the value of the gold you harvest. Now, also
in that episode, we just did a basic primer about
what gold isn't where it comes from. So I'm gonna
I'm gonna real quick just go through the basics of that.
But if you want more details, I would just refer
you back to that episode the Tide of Gold, or
just hang around because we'll probably run it as a
vault episode sometime in the next several months. So anyway,
(02:29):
gold is a relatively rare element compared to the you know,
the commonplace elements of hydrogen and oxygen and iron, et cetera.
But obviously veins of it can be found in Earth's crust.
So where does gold actually come from? Well, there's a
you know, there's a lot of uncertainty here, but basically,
you know, there's evidence to indicate that gold is produced
in extremely violent stellar phenomena. Uh, you know, it is.
(02:50):
It is the stuff of the stars, quite fittingly as
we as we get into the topic here today. But
there there have been a few different theories. There's like
late Veneer hypothesis that argues that gold and other specific
materials were added into the Earth's crust roughly three point
eight billion years ago via a bombardment of the ridium
rich meteorites UM. And then there's a there's there's some
(03:14):
other hypotheses out there as well. UM. For instance, there's
the rival magma ocean hypothesis that argues that gold was
here all along, um, but at any rate. Gold is.
You know, when you look at some of the ways
that that we find it, in the way it interacts
with other substances, it does feel a little weird, a
little alien. It does feel like something that that that
came down from on high, you know, and it absolutely is.
(03:37):
Though it's funny to think about it. I guess this
has come up in a few episodes in the past
few months about how when you start to look into
the origins of any individual element, it's always like, wow,
that's crazy. Now, of course, the idea that gold comes
from extremely violent stellar phenomena, either through nucleosynthesis through a supernova,
so when the star is literally like exploding and coming
(03:57):
apart at the end of its life cycle, or through
the collision of neutron stars. I mean, the things that
are phenomenon they're so violent and energetic you cannot imagine them.
They won't fit in your brain. Uh, that's amazing. But
then again, the origin of every element is amazing because
like it was either that or it was a lighter
(04:18):
element that was formed as a star was like nearing
the end of its life cycle and started fusing heavier
and heavier elements and eventually exploded, or it is a
particle that is original to the universe since the Big Bang,
as would be the case with with like hydrogen particles.
So I guess no matter what element you're talking about,
its origins are mind boggling. But the specific origins of
(04:39):
gold are one of the mind boggling ones. It's like, yeah,
something horrible had to happen long long ago before humans existed,
to put all this gold into the dust through that
gathered through space and eventually coalesced in our solar system,
and some of it ended up on this planet, right
And and so while a lot of different materials that
(05:00):
up up in the Earth, you know, it just feels
you can often feel like, well, that's just something you
find in the dirt. You know. There's of course there's
some metal, and there's some rocks in there, there's some
minerals in there. But gold is is interesting in that,
you know, it is it sparkles like like like nothing else,
you know. And uh, And of course since ancient times,
people have been coming across it, especially glimpsing it in
(05:23):
streams and riverbeds. Um. So humans have a long history
with gold. And so in order to research a bit
about about humanity's history working with gold, UM, I looked
to a book I frequently turned to, the seventy grade
Inventions of the Ancient World by Brian and Fagan, which
has a number of different um UH selections in there
(05:45):
where he's dealing with with specific technological advancements from the
ancient world and generally UM partnering with a particular expert
UH in a related field. UH. The Fagan, of course,
has has written quite a bit ancient technology just in general.
There are a lot of academic papers out there, and
we've referred to some of them on the show before.
(06:06):
So as pointed out by Brian and Fagin and Palti Cradic,
who specializes in ancient metal technology, gold pops up relatively
late in the archaeological record of the Old World. While
evidence of copper dates back to the eighth millennium b
C in the Middle East, gold doesn't pop up until
five thousand BC in what is now Bulgaria, and it
(06:29):
pops up in the Americas during the second millennium BC. Now,
the oldest gold artifacts that we we know of our
Neolithic artifacts from a cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, and it's
a variety of gold adornments, including ringlets, discs, and necklaces.
Joe I included a photo here for you to look at.
But if anyone else out there wants to see this themselves,
(06:51):
just do a search for Varna v A r in
a gold or gold artifacts and you'll see the skeleton
and these various gold implements that we're buried with them. Now,
is this image we're seeing Do you know if this
is actually as it was found, like institute or has
this been arranged for this? This particular photo looks arranged. Um.
(07:13):
I've seen some some photographs of it as they actually
pulled it from the earth, and uh and and it's
it's really interesting because of course the gold is very
very shiny like it's instantly recognizable as gold. Now, gold
is almost always found as a metal rather than an ore.
It typically contains five to silver and it was originally
(07:33):
used without refining it sometimes with copper added. But then
in the with the introduction of gold coinage in the
seventh century BC, and this would have been in um
lydia Um. This this introduced new requirements. You needed guaranteed weight,
you needed guaranteed purity. Thus refining was necessary to separate
the silver from the gold. And the process here is
(07:56):
um is parting by which gold dust or foil is
heated in a pot with salt. So's we got a
stew going baby, Yeah, pretty much. Uh, this is what
uh Fagan and Cratic had to say to summarize this quote.
The chlorine and ferric chloride vapors so generated removed the
(08:17):
silver from the gold as volatile silver chloride, leaving behind
pure gold. Okay, So it was creating a chemical reaction
with the I guess the sodium chloride in the salt,
where the silver under the heating would bond with the
chlorine and it would evaporate off. Yeah. And so as
(08:37):
gold coin spread, so too did this method of refinement.
And it wouldn't change for roughly two thousand years and
long and for longer in other parts of the world,
but certainly in regard to you know, Europe and the Mediterranean,
the Middle East, you know, it would be two thousand
years before uh it changed much. Now a note, simple
cast and beaten gold can be accomplished without specialized metal tools.
(09:02):
More sophisticated gold working wasn't possible to the Bronze age
um by in the near East. Now, meanwhile, in South America,
UM gold workers there didn't refine the gold, but they
were able to control the composition by adding via hammering
or casting, copper to the natural gold silver alloy to
(09:23):
produce a metal called tumbaga. And what they do is
they take it and they treat the surface with a
stringent chemicals to oxidize the copper, and then they would
they would remove this with strong brine or perhaps acidic
fruit juices, and then they would burnish the surface to
create a resplendent finish. I didn't realize there'd be so
much food like processes in the creation of this jewelry.
(09:48):
Is it true that um the copper involved when you're
mixing copper with gold or with silver and gold, the
copper helps strengthen it and make it less malleable because
gold in its natural metallic form is actually quite soft,
isn't it. Yeah? Yeah, And that's that's that's interesting because
that comes up as as being one of the one
of the reasons why we see gold used as in
(10:11):
jewelry throughout the through human history. I mean, for starters.
It's beautiful, and we'll get into some of the symbolic
reasons for its beauty uh and wyant catches our eye.
But also what else are you going to use gold for?
You know, you you can't really make a useful gold
tool because it's going to to bend and uh and
it's it's it's just not going to hold up to
(10:31):
the pressures required. Likewise, you can't make a gold sword
that's going to be sharp enough and strong enough to
use in combat. Um, but it lends itself well to
pure decoration or to decorating a particularly important sword or
its hilth anyway, uh, that sort of thing. Now, I
think gold would actually become practically useful in ways that
couldn't necessarily have been predicted earlier once we get into
(10:54):
the age of electronics, because gold, of course has very
important conductive proper these. Yeah. It's interesting how for for
so much of human history, gold is this thing that
is absolutely valuable and uh and desired and is used
you know as a means of of of trading with
other people and and and determining wealth, and yet it
(11:15):
didn't really have any uses for the most part. Uh. Well,
there's some exceptions to that, but no really uses until
we get into the modern world where we can actually
look at electronic uses for gold. Now. One of the
advantages of gold, and one one of the reasons that
it's always been favored as a jewelry metal, is that
it is that gold occurs as nuggets, dust, or veins
and does not have to be converted from complex mineral ors.
(11:38):
Deposits of gold can also be hunted out via spotting.
Those glittering specks of gold and rivers and streams um
very eye catching. And the reason for this is interesting
because gold is also highly resistant to chemical tarnishing or corrosion,
and that's why gold can spend thousands of years exposed
in a stream bed uh and remain visible. Yeah, I
(12:00):
mean many other metals naturally lose their luster when they're
just exposed to the atmosphere. You know, they react with
gases in the air or with water. Of course, you
would notice how quickly iron rusts. I mean, iron that's
exposed to the air does not maintain a lustrous finish
for very long at all. And the same is true
of all kinds of metals that you would commonly encounter
(12:21):
in the world. They can take on a kind of
dull appearance pretty quickly through reaction just with what's around them,
and and people in the ancient world noticed this, they
picked up on this and uh, and as you can imagine,
various ideas became attached to it, as as Fagin points
out in another section of the book, with Jack Ogden,
author of nine two's Jewelry in the Ancient World, quote,
(12:43):
a gold vessel did not ruin the taste of the
soup in life, and could remain buried with its deceased
owner to serve them in the afterlife and even perhaps
transfer some of the metal's longevity. Yeah, so you can
imagine how the the the idea of gold in some
ways symbolizing purity or or harmony or or permanence, is
(13:04):
not just because it looks pretty. It's because of the
chemical properties that keep it looking pretty. You know that
it doesn't tarnish and lose its luster the way other
metals do. And you you see various symbolism involved. To
a lot of times, silver is seen as the color
of the moon, but gold, of course, is the color
of the sun. And the ancient Egyptians even thought of
(13:27):
gold as the skin of raw or the skin of ray,
which is especially telling when you think of gold sheets
and foil and we'll get into that in a minute here. Um.
And and of course there are plenty of other examples
of gold and mythology that are pretty interesting. We have
to remember that in Greek mythology, Zeus himself becomes a
shower of gold in order to impregnate a mortal Oh yeah,
(13:50):
that's in the story of Dunay who is imprisoned by
her father, a Chrysius of Argos, and Zeus comes down
in the form of a shower of gold and they
can eve the child, who becomes Perseus. The uh, the
ostensible hero of the Perseus and Medusa story. But according
to our favorite retellings, maybe the villain of the story,
you know, depends on depends on the details. Now, one
(14:19):
of the interesting things about some of the other stories
of Greek mythology that involve gold is it easy to
just sort of dismiss it is like, okay, you make
something gold and then it's notable, right, A golden helmet, okay,
it's magic whatever. A golden fleece, sorry, it's like a
normal fleece, except it's golden. Well. Um, that may that
particular case may be connected to the use of fleece
unshared sheep hide to pan for gold and streams. Oh interesting, Yeah,
(14:44):
I'd never imagined that, though it's funny. I have thought
before about often when I'm cooking in the kitchen, a
thought that comes to my head is, uh, what did
ancient people use for a callander? But I guess I
guess cloth would be a pretty reasonable choice there, right, Yeah,
it would apparently cling to the to the uncheered, cheap hide.
(15:05):
Now another tale that we think I'll instantly think of
regarding gold and Greek mythology is, of course, the myth
of Midas is golden touch. Um. So King Midas a Phrygia.
The story goes, he finds this drunken satyr. Uh, just
like just really drunk, even for a satyr. I think
the satyr is drunk. It needs nursing back to health.
(15:26):
Now our sayer's obviously they're going to be party animals.
But are they party the kind of party animal that
can hold their liquor the kind that can't. Well, I'm
guessing they probably could, but they won't. You know, they're
because they're all about you know, excess. Right, Yeah, let's
cut loose. And of course their master is Dionysus and um,
(15:48):
and Midas recognizes this, and so you know, nurses nurses
his creature back to health, and then Dionysius offers him
a reward, and so Midas is like, well, I've got
pretty much everything I need. I'm I'm rich and all,
but I'm sure to love gold and I would like
to have more of it. And so the god gives
him the Golden Touch, and I think we all know
how the rest of the story goes. The main portion
of this story, of course, is that everything he touches
(16:09):
turns to gold, which is great until he goes to
grab some grapes to eat, until he throws himself on
his bed and it turns into unforgiving gold. I mean,
I guess it's better than if if your bed were
made out of iron, but still as far as like
things to sleep on, still not comfortable. And then when
he touches his own daughter, he turns her to solid gold.
(16:29):
So he goes back to Dionysus and says, hey, I
take it back, just I. I don't want this golden
touch anymore, and so Dionysus tells him to wash his
hands in the river Pactolus near the coast of modern Turkey.
And indeed the gold drains from his fingertips in the
moving water, So I think you can all see it
now moving water. Yes, there's apparently a connection here to
(16:51):
traditions of panning for gold as well. And indeed the
river in question wants contained electroum gold and silver, so
it was a river of rich And I know because
I just looked it up after having said something that
was totally wrong. Electrum is actually an alloy of gold
and silver that's may may have trace amounts of other
medals in it, such as copper. Yeah, for some reason,
(17:13):
I thought electrum was amber. I'm glad I stopped and checked. Yeah,
but I don't think I really knew about this connection.
I mean, I obviously one attaches themselves to the to
the basic message of the myth, you know, the sort
of you know, be careful what you wish for because
the reality of it could be a curse. But anyway,
(17:33):
this is this is right right interesting And if anyone
out there wants to see a really cool animated version
of this um the the the ted Ad series which
are draw all these animated educational shorts, they have one
on Midas that's uh, that's does a great job telling
the story and has some amusing visual choices. Yeah, uh yeah,
(17:53):
it's a great story that works on multiple levels. Obviously,
you have the you know, the standard monkeys Paul kind
of be careful what you wish for inter protation. It
works on that level. It works in saying you know,
there's more to life than riches, of course, but then
it also I think it works pretty well as an
illustration of the ways that we can become alienated and
deranged by over dedication to the acquisitive process, you know,
(18:17):
like if you are overly focused on acquiring money, Like
I think it's quite clear that this has potential to
ruin other aspects of your life. Absolutely. Now. Ogden and
Fagin point out that the Near East had advanced gold
working techniques so for the ancient world, such as gold
wire chain soldering by two thousand BC, but it didn't
(18:40):
pick up in China until the mid first millennium BC,
when it was possibly introduced via Russia. Um Jewelry craftsmanship
in China mainly revolved around another difficult material, jade, which
was essentially unknown in the Mediterranean. In the Eastern World,
it wasn't traded much, and jade was also used in
True America by one thousand BC. This is interesting, I'm
(19:04):
reminded of. We just recently recorded a couple of episodes
about the Shanhaijing, the ancient mythic geography of the regions
of China, and if you just flip through that, it
seems to me like the minerals most often mentioned when
they're calling out different mountains and seas are real gar
and cinnabar. Yeah, and and then then jade is mentioned
(19:25):
a lot as well as desirable. Now, pure gold is
one thing, but throughout history gold crafts people have also
turned to gold plating or gold you know, guilding. But
it wasn't until that we see more durable guilding techniques
that don't depend on just simply gluing it in place
or bending the gold foil around things. And of course
(19:46):
one of the big advantages of this is, you know,
you don't have to try and craft something out of
just gold. You can have something made out of it,
more durable metal, something made out of wood, and you
can put the gold around it, and you know, this
is the kind of craftmanship we see in a lot
of gold artifacts that make to mind when you think
about golden wonders now. Ogden and Fagin also point out
that the application of gold foil to silver and copper
(20:08):
was largely superseded in Roman times and earlier in China
by a process known as amalgam gilding. So what you
do is you mix gold with mercury and slathered this
all over the metal, and then you heat it up
and the mercury is driven off in a vapor, leaving
the gold coating. That sounds like that may have created
some health problems for some ancient metal workers. Yeah, yeah,
(20:30):
the mercury vapors um to be avoided. Um. Now, Now,
the Romans also used imitation gold made from copper zinc
alloys and they would just polish this up to a
high shine. Now, another gold purification process, popular in Europe
in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is known as cupulation.
And to understand this, we have to turn back to silver,
the moon metal. So silver was used in the Middle
(20:54):
East since the fifth millennium BC, but on a much
smaller scale, and at this stage they would have viewed
native silver occurring in rich silver ores that could be
directly smelted. But most silver is found in lead ore,
so you needed a different method. Yeah, I believe this
stuff was referred to as galena. You can see this
coming up in ancient texts. I think we also talked
(21:15):
about it in our Cupids, Lead and Narrow episode. But
galena was this naturally occurring mineral form of lead, I
think the lead sulfide. But this ore was a really
important source of silver in the ancient world. So cupulation
as a process emerges seems like somewhere around a thousand BC.
During the process of lead oar is heated to about
(21:36):
two thousand and twelve degrees fahrenheit or eleven degrees celsius,
and this oxidizes the lead um to lead oxide uh
into quote cratic and fake and quote which either blew away,
poisoning everyone around, or formed a molten mass of of
of letharge. And then the silver is what remains. And
it's interesting. Plenty of the Elder described this process in
(21:59):
the Natural History. This is from book thirty three, and
this is the Rackham translation. By the way, quote after
these details, let us speak about the varieties of silver
ore the next madness of mankind. Silver is only found
in deep shafts and raises no hopes of its existence
by any signs giving off no shining sparkle, such as
(22:19):
are seen in the case of gold. The ore is
sometimes red, sometimes ash colored. It cannot be smelted except
when combined with lead, or with the vein of lead
called galena lead ore, which is usually found running near
veins of silver ore. Also, when submitted to the same
process of firing, part of the ore precipitates as lead,
(22:39):
while the silver floats on the surface like oil on water.
Oh what a beautiful image there. Uh this this occurs
in the same section. I just have to read this
to it. This has to do with with gold and
mercury because this is also from plenty same translation quote.
There is also a mineral found in these veins of
silver which contains a humor in round drops that is
(23:02):
always liquid and is called quicksilver. It acts as a
poison on everything and breaks vessels by penetrating them with
malignant corruption. All substances float on its surface except gold,
which is the only thing that it attracts to itself. Consequently,
it is also excellent for refining gold, as if it
is briskly shaken in earthen vessels, it rejects all the
(23:24):
impurities contained in it. Now, would this be referring to
liquid mercury here, Yes, I believe so. Yeah, you can
imagine the little of the little round drops of it.
You know. Uh, you shouldn't play with liquid mercury because
it can be highly toxic. But I have to say,
when I was a kid, I took a part of
thermostat one time and I got it the old style
(23:45):
mercury switch, and boy that was fun to play with,
even though you shouldn't. Well, I never got to play
with it, but my my my dad was a dentist,
and so I remember him showing me some mercury at
one point and it was really cool. Yeah. Now, in
medieval Africa, another method of gold purification was in use.
And this is really interesting, um because it involves glass.
(24:07):
So it is detailed by Mark Walton, co director of
the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts and discussed
in the Atlas Obscura article. Medieval Africans had a unique
process for purifying gold with glass. By Evan Nicole Brown.
What they did is they took or and other raw
materials typically found in rivers and mixed it with glass
before heating it up. So glass, you wouldn't have thought
(24:29):
of that, yeah, I I wouldn't have. So gold is inert.
So while the various impurities and other materials melted into
the glass, the gold remained. And so Walton's team here
they used sand, gold dust, and recycled glass to reproduce
the same process. It's pretty neat. Yeah. Apparently the context
of this ancient process was that it was taking place
(24:51):
at a West African site known as tad Mecca, which
is now in the Republic of Molly. All right, well,
let's turn now to the subject of gold nanoparticles, and
and this would the term gold nano particles, of course,
would seem to be on the surface entirely connected with
the modern age of gold, right, in which the skin
of raw or the skin of ray has come to
(25:12):
serve humans in in ways beyond mere luster and monetary worth. Right. Well,
anything now with the prefix nano's smacks of like the
modern technological age, you know, the idea of nanotechnology. But
of course, another way of looking at nanotechnology or nanoparticles
is that you can just say, well, there's small particles
of something that can be suspended in a liquid, which
(25:33):
in some cases have existed for hundreds or thousands of years, Yeah,
all you need is a particle of matter that is
between one and one hundred nanometers in diameter, so that
that in and of itself is by no means a
modern reality, exclusively a modern reality, and the same can
certainly be said of gold nanoparticles. So. An author by
the name of Chai Chan wrote an excellent article for
(25:54):
Science History Institutes Distillations back in two thousand and eight
titled from Nanotech to Nanoscience, and in it, the author
points out that despite the terms popular emergence in the
nineteen seventies and eighties, there are plenty of much older
technologies that make use of what we think of today
as nanotechnology, and um, I'm not going to mention them
all here, but there's one that concerns gold, right, And
(26:16):
I think this was actually the example that Kate brought
up an email that inspired us to talk about this today. Yeah.
So briefly, what it consisted of is during the sixt
seventeenth and eighteen centuries, medieval artisans added gold chloride to
molten glass to give it a red tint, and they
added silver nitrate to turn it yellow. And recent scientific
(26:37):
analysis has revealed that this process works because of gold
and silver nanoparticles in the glass, reflecting red and yellow
light acting as quantum dots. So some examples of what
I guess we would call Renaissance stained glass actually did
involve nanotechnology, right. So it's something to keep in mind
because the occasional like if you hear someone say, well,
(26:58):
you know those demand ask A steel swords that they
used during the Crusades, those had those had carbon nanotubes
in them, you know. So if you hear that, don't think, oh, well,
this is clearly an ancient alien garbage. No, no it's not.
You don't need um like modern science to get things
like carbon nanotubes and gold nanoparticles. Right. Maybe we'll have
(27:22):
to come back to Damascus steel sometime. Yeah, I think
I think we should. It would at the very least
would make a fun artifact, I think than now. Another
place that you often see gold nanoparticles brought up these
days is in the realm of medicine, especially experimental or
(27:42):
cutting edge medicine. Uh. And there's one story I came
across that was pretty interesting. I'm not sure how it
has held up since the time it was published, but
I have to mention it for some reasons that will
become obvious. What about injections of gold nanoparticles as a
form of contraception. This has a King Midacy kind of
feel to it already. Yeah, So there is an original
(28:05):
study here that I want to mention by win Ching
Lee at all published in Nano Letters. In uh it's
fairly technical. So I'm relying here mostly on a summary
right up, done at the time for Nature Materials by
one of my favorite science writers, Philip Ball, who writes
a lot of good articles about physics and chemistry. And
Ball opens by saying, you know, there are a number
(28:26):
of potential uses for metallic nanoparticles in medicine, some that
are already being used, some that are being rolled out
as we speak. But one of the more interesting and
commonly explored options at the time of this study was
to use metallic nanoparticles inside the body as antennae to
(28:47):
receive quote sub optical electromagnetic signals. So little metal nanoparticles
in the body working as an antenna to receive infrared,
microwave or radio sign knolls or magnetic fields. And one
thing this does is enable what Ball calls quote highly
localized heating by wireless means. So just one weird and
(29:11):
quite fascinating example that the Ball brings up. There is
a study by Huang at All called remote control of
ion channels and neurons through magnetic field heating of nanoparticles,
published in Nature Nanotechnology in two thousand ten, and ball
summary of the study goes like this quote. Manganese fair
(29:31):
righte nanoparticles six nanometers across fixed next to calcium ion
channels in vivo, meaning in the living organism. In the
nematode worm keen or hebditis elegans were used to trigger
firing of neurons in response to a radio frequency magnetic field,
altering the direction of motion of the entire organism. So
(29:54):
potentially the control of the behavior of an animal like
a worm by in injecting metallic nanoparticles and then heating
them up with a wireless signal. And Ball also points
out that using similar techniques uh in a paper by
Stanley at All, there was a report that researchers were
able to control calcium triggered insulin release in mice. So
(30:18):
you can imagine that if you could use heating of
nanoparticles or communication with metallic nanoparticles, especially at localized organs
within the body through wireless remote control signals. This could
be extremely useful in medicine. So by the time of
this study, there is a precedent for using radio or
infrared signaling to control metallic nanoparticles injected within the body,
(30:42):
often by heating them up, and this could be used
to do all kinds of things such as like targeted
thermal destruction of cancer cells, which is I think still
a live possibility in many cases. But this study by
Lee at All used the heating of injected metallic like
nanoparticles for a different purpose, which was to induce sterility
(31:04):
in male mice. What that means is the study design
involved injecting gold nano rods into rodent testicles and then
heating them with near infrared radiation, and the researchers in
this study suggested that a method like this could potentially
be useful as a contraceptive for animals such as household
(31:25):
pets uh And there are several reasons that they argue
in its favor. One is that allegedly, despite involving gold,
it is a very very tiny amount of gold. It
would be very cheap, especially cheap compared to you know,
expensive surgical techniques, so it would not involve surgery. It
would be controllable, meaning potentially non permanent, depending on how
(31:46):
much heating of the testicular tissue you do. Apparently higher
levels of heating would render permanent sterility, but lower levels
of heating appear somewhat effective at just creating a temporary
contraceptive effect. And also the they argue that, hey, gold
nanoparticles appear to be basically non toxic within a million bodies. Well,
(32:08):
you know how VET bills are. I if I were
to go to the vat end that were to tell
me I need you to literally put gold inside this animal,
I would be like, yeah, that sounds about right. But
but on the serious, serious note, if it we're you know,
less invasive, and we are talking about a very small,
tiny amount of gold, I could see this working. Yeah.
(32:29):
But of course, as I was saying, the import of
this research is not just in the specific use case
they're describing. Of course, heat in mail gonads will inhibit
sperm production. Um. But but Ball notes once again quote
because heat will inhibit sperm production, it seemed natural to
extend earlier work on nanoparticle based photothermal treatment of cancer
(32:50):
cells to this application. So He's drowing the connection there
between the use and treatment of of appelation of cancer cells,
of destruction of cancerous tissue through through remote heating of
these metallic nanoparticles, to the destruction of sperm cells. And
of course gold is a fairly nonreactive metal. It is
mostly nonreactive within the body, so injections of gold were
(33:13):
at least believed at the time to be relatively non toxic.
I was poking around, and that seems to gold is
still from what I can tell, believed to be relatively
non toxic as far as internal metals go in the body.
Of course, there could be some things I didn't come across,
so I'm not saying like you will just go consume
a bunch of gold. Now. Another thing that you have
(33:33):
to worry about if you are injecting something into the
body is how will the immune system respond? And Ball
rights that according to this study, UH coding the gold
nanoparticles in polyethylene glycol quote enables them to evade the
immune system. Lead All found that peg coated gold nano
rods about forty nanometers long injected into the test ees
(33:55):
of male mice could raise the temperature up to forty
five degrees c when irradiated with an infrared laser. Uh. Now,
I guess you're wondering, like, would this be painful? Apparently,
it would not take a painful amount of heat to
be effective. Quote. The degree of heating, although not unduly uncomfortable,
essentially destroyed the test ees and suppressed spermato genesis permanently.
(34:18):
But milder heating meaning lower irradiation intensity, impaired sperm production
only temporarily. And they also showed that that the mice
that it had the temporary thing appeared to regain normal
reproductive function after some time had elapsed, and that there
were no major changes in their behavior like eating or
aggression or sexual activity after the treatment. So they say
(34:42):
that at least in this state, the procedure appeared probably
safe and effective, But of course they're they're always the caveats.
Ball notes that it's not clear whether the nano rods
are ultimately voided from the body. Quote the concentration and
the testes and epididymis declined over time, but the particles
seemed to accumulate in the spleen and liver when obviously
(35:03):
wonders about an extension to humans. That's certainly the author's
long term goal, and they are confident that it should
work in theory. It's just it's it is kind of um.
It is interesting to think about when we think back
to that myth of Zeus's golden shower and how um
you know that enables him to reproduce with a human
and here we're talking about similar We're talking about golden
(35:26):
particles being used, uh, to prevent reproduction from taking place. Yeah. Now,
I looked around and I haven't seen much follow up
from this idea since the study was published in And
I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if
that means people have looked into it and it is
not such a hot idea after all, no pun intended,
or maybe it's just waiting for somebody to do some
(35:47):
more follow up research. I'm not sure. But assuming the
basic method is sound, even if it were never like
extended experimentally to humans or anything, the authors are trying
to make the case that hey, having a less invasive
method for effect to contraception on animals such as household
pets and domestic animals could be extremely useful. If you
know you have a you have a cheaper, less invasive
(36:08):
method of rendering household pets sterile. That would be a
good thing for the world. Yeah, I just don't want
anybody then stealing my cat and trying to melt down
for her gold, her precious gold. But whether or not
gold based thermal contraception for humans or other animals, whatever
actually go anywhere. Gold nanoparticles show lots of promise in
(36:30):
all kinds of other medical research, especially as I was
saying earlier, in things like the treatment of cancer. Gold
nanoparticles tend to be strong candidates for use within the body,
again because they can be used for all kinds of
diagnostics and targeting of specific tissues. But they're thought to
be relatively non toxic and tolerated by the immune system.
If you just do searches on the medical literature, tons
(36:52):
of stuff about gold nanoparticles studies will will come up.
There are tons of them. But just to pick one
example of this kind of thing that I came cross,
this is from a couple of years ago, published by
A Restinahad at All in two thousand nineteen in p
n A s Gold nanoshell Localized photothermal ablation of prostate
tumors in a clinical pilot device study. So this is
(37:15):
looking at using gold nanoparticles to allow the thermal destruction
like targeted heating of cancerous tissues within the prostate gland
or around the prostate gland heating of that through directed
near infrared light. And this kind of thing seems to
be a pretty promising method for destroying cancer cells without
(37:36):
harming the rest of the body too much. And the
authors point out that this thing can be really important
for UH for cancers such as prostate cancer, because prostate
cancer tends to well, as they write quote, the prostate
is near several vital structures such as the urethra, neurovascular
bundle UH and whole gland treatments for prostate cancer can
(37:57):
disrupt normal urinary bowel and set actual functioning. So having
some kind of ultra focal method for destroying the cancerous
tissue without harming too much of the surrounding tissue is
especially useful for organs like this within the body. And
this isn't the only one. There are other organs like this,
So of course I have to wonder if we're at
an age of of dawning, you know, gold nanoparticle or
(38:20):
otherwise metallic nanoparticle based treatments and diagnostics throughout the medical world.
How will this manifest in science fiction adaptations of the
Mida Smith? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of I mean
the myth itself, Like we're saying, it's so many ways
to interpret it and look at it. It's already right
for just continual reevaluation, but now we have new ways
(38:41):
to think about the material central to a new ways
to think about gold, new uses for gold. Yeah, it
turns everything on its head. And of course I also
love the idea of a god taking on the form
of gold nanoparticles like that, that in and of itself
sounds pretty rad Well, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody
picks up on like the studies like the control of
a knee meta to behavior via injection of those weren't
(39:02):
gold nanoparticles but metallic nanoparticles to like heat it and
make it move one direction rather than another. Surely somebody
will take that idea way too far. Yeah, I mean
in fiction, not in reality. I'm not saying somebody's going
to create a nanoparticle mind control device. Seems implausible at
the human level, by the way, Well, and as far
as just injected metal goes. I mean, two examples of
(39:24):
that from science fiction come to mind. There's, of course,
the one of the X Men movies. There's a scene
where prison guards injected with some sort of a metallic liquid,
which then enables Magneto to manipulate him. Too much iron
in your blood? Yes, yeah, pretty good? Sing? Is that
a call? I was that? I guess it was X
two x two. Yeah, that was the one that was
(39:44):
one of Brian Cox in it. That that was, Oh,
he's so great. But then also on the the animated
series the Legend of Cora, which involves earth beenders, firebenders,
water benders, but then of one variety of earth benders
or metal benders who essentially have magneto like control over metals.
Uh so there's manipulation of metallic based poisons within the
(40:05):
human body, which are are pretty interesting. But I don't
recall them bending gold at any point. It could be wrong.
Maybe maybe it happens in like some of the comic
books or something, but so I don't know Avatar Legend
of Cora fans out there, if there's gold bending going on,
let me know about it. Hey, explain the whole bender thing.
To me, I've never watched Avatar. I don't I don't
(40:26):
know what it is, though I've seen people on the
internet talking about Airbenders and other kind of benders. What
are the benders? Okay, Well, first of all, Um, Avatar
is a tremendous show. Avatar the Last Airbender is just
really great. I didn't watch it until this summer and
I watched it with the family, and it's just just wonderful,
just a great show. Started to finish and in Legend
of Kor is the sequel to it. But basically in
(40:47):
this world, which is like a uh, you know based
it's it's not our world. It's some sort of a
you know, alien parallel type of world with a lot
of hybrid creatures. But and it's also based in in
a large part on Asian cultures and Asian mythologies. But
you have people selected, you know, I guess, kind of
the mutants who are born with the ability to control
(41:10):
with their mind and with their body certain elements, so
like firebenders can move fire around and use fire magic essentially, Um.
And then you have water benders, the Airbenders, and then
the earth Benders, and this factors into like nationalities and politics,
and then you have somebody that is the Avatar, and
the Avatar is like the like the I guess they're
(41:32):
like a Bodhi Softva or something. You know, they're um there.
There's only one at a time, and there's like reincarnation involved,
and they are able to bend all the elements and
are supposed to be a force of balance in the world.
So why is there a last Airbender? Well, because of
the the politics and the nationalities. So the Fire Nation
(41:53):
tries to wipe out the Air Nation and they thought
they had achieved it because the different the different Avatar
is born in a different nation. So like one generation,
the avatar is born a Firebender and then has to
and then learns to use the other bending powers. But
then the next Avatar, the next reincarnation, will be born
(42:13):
with you know, with a different starting ability. Wouldn't that
be suicidal though? If the Fire Nation wipes out the
Air Nation, because the fire needs air in order to
you know, sustain itself exactly, And that's why you needed
an Avatar to come around and bring balance back to
the world. I see. But also the show is especially avatar.
It's also really funny. It has some great humor in it,
so it's not it's not all like just serious, but
(42:35):
it balances those two things. Well, it's it's it can
be really funny, it can be cute, but it can
also be very seriously minded, has great drama. It's it's
really one of the best animated series I've ever seen.
This episode paid for by the Last Airbender. Yeah, yeah,
I mean not really, but yeah, okay, you've convinced me. Yeah,
it's going on the list at least. All Right, Well,
(42:56):
I guess that's it for for Gold though. That's all
the gold been thing we're gonna do today. But obviously
Gold will continue to come up again, either as a
material related to something we're talking about. I'm sure it'll
come up in future part of Fact episodes and who know,
you know, we could come back and discuss the electronic
side of gold in the future. Oh yeah, absolutely, Maybe
we'll do a weird house cinema that involves gold. I'm
(43:18):
sure there are plenty of things to choose from. There's
a movie that's right at the tip of my tongue,
but I can't think of what it is. It's got
a gold monster. Well, there's the Hideous Sun Demon and
then I think there's some sort of there's doctor there's
doctor Goldfoot in the Big Machine Machine. That's what I'm thinking.
Not a gold monster at all. The Doctor Goldfoot in
(43:39):
the Bikini Machine is a movie where Vincent Price has
a big machine that's like the like quiz nose of
them that you stick the sandwich in, except what comes
out of it. As like I think Ladies and Bikini's.
Frankie Avalon's in that. Yeah, he plays a secret agent.
It's a comedy. It's like a parody film of James
Bond type stuff. So he's this is the comedic gold
(43:59):
thing basically. All right, all right, well maybe we'll put
it on the list. In the meantime, if you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
just remember core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday's Artifact on
Wednesday's Listener Mail on Monday's Friday. That's our time to
do a little weird house cinema where we we put
most of the science aside and we just focus on
a cinematic weirdness, one film at a time. Uh. And
(44:22):
you can find the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
feed wherever you get your podcast wherever that happens to
be if they give you the power to do so.
We just asked that you rate, review, and subscribe Huge
Things as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
(44:43):
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, this is the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you kind of a
grab bag episode that was inspired by an email we
(00:21):
got from a listener not too long ago. It was
from a listener named Kate who wrote in to tell
us about how she works sometimes in uh I forget
exactly what kind of laboratory it was, but that she
works sometimes with nanoparticles like gold nanoparticles in the lab
and suggested that we look into doing an episode on
gold and gold nanoparticles. And we were like, hey, that
(00:42):
sounds interesting. So today we're rolling out the buffet card
of of gold, gold nanoparticles and things that struck us
as interesting. Yeah. So, um, first of all, I do
want to mention an earlier episode. This was not that
long ago, actually just from July. We need an episode
titled The Tide of Old, which ultimately had to do
(01:03):
with a con I believe right, Yeah, I thought that
was a fun episode. It was actually about a a
scam that was run by a clergyman named Prescott Joern.
Again at a against a community on the coast of
Maine in the late eighteen nineties. Thing it was, and
he pretended that he had created a machine that would
(01:24):
be able to extract endless quantities of gold from the
sea water. And he did this whole thing like that.
The scam was quite elaborate. He bought, uh, he bought
some local property on the coast and and set up
a fake processing facility and hired tons of people and
got all these investors and then eventually just skipped down
(01:44):
with the money. But then we talked about how he
actually wasn't the last person to try to extract gold
from the sea. There had been real attempts to extract
gold from the sea, and there is actually uh an
appreciable amount of gold in the sea water, but the
actual atempts to build factories to extract it have always
proved that it costs more to get the gold out
(02:07):
than the value of the gold you harvest. Now, also
in that episode, we just did a basic primer about
what gold isn't where it comes from. So I'm gonna
I'm gonna real quick just go through the basics of that.
But if you want more details, I would just refer
you back to that episode the Tide of Gold, or
just hang around because we'll probably run it as a
vault episode sometime in the next several months. So anyway,
(02:29):
gold is a relatively rare element compared to the you know,
the commonplace elements of hydrogen and oxygen and iron, et cetera.
But obviously veins of it can be found in Earth's crust.
So where does gold actually come from? Well, there's a
you know, there's a lot of uncertainty here, but basically,
you know, there's evidence to indicate that gold is produced
in extremely violent stellar phenomena. Uh, you know, it is.
(02:50):
It is the stuff of the stars, quite fittingly as
we as we get into the topic here today. But
there there have been a few different theories. There's like
late Veneer hypothesis that argues that gold and other specific
materials were added into the Earth's crust roughly three point
eight billion years ago via a bombardment of the ridium
rich meteorites UM. And then there's a there's there's some
(03:14):
other hypotheses out there as well. UM. For instance, there's
the rival magma ocean hypothesis that argues that gold was
here all along, um, but at any rate. Gold is.
You know, when you look at some of the ways
that that we find it, in the way it interacts
with other substances, it does feel a little weird, a
little alien. It does feel like something that that that
came down from on high, you know, and it absolutely is.
(03:37):
Though it's funny to think about it. I guess this
has come up in a few episodes in the past
few months about how when you start to look into
the origins of any individual element, it's always like, wow,
that's crazy. Now, of course, the idea that gold comes
from extremely violent stellar phenomena, either through nucleosynthesis through a supernova,
so when the star is literally like exploding and coming
(03:57):
apart at the end of its life cycle, or through
the collision of neutron stars. I mean, the things that
are phenomenon they're so violent and energetic you cannot imagine them.
They won't fit in your brain. Uh, that's amazing. But
then again, the origin of every element is amazing because
like it was either that or it was a lighter
(04:18):
element that was formed as a star was like nearing
the end of its life cycle and started fusing heavier
and heavier elements and eventually exploded, or it is a
particle that is original to the universe since the Big Bang,
as would be the case with with like hydrogen particles.
So I guess no matter what element you're talking about,
its origins are mind boggling. But the specific origins of
(04:39):
gold are one of the mind boggling ones. It's like, yeah,
something horrible had to happen long long ago before humans existed,
to put all this gold into the dust through that
gathered through space and eventually coalesced in our solar system,
and some of it ended up on this planet, right
And and so while a lot of different materials that
(05:00):
up up in the Earth, you know, it just feels
you can often feel like, well, that's just something you
find in the dirt. You know. There's of course there's
some metal, and there's some rocks in there, there's some
minerals in there. But gold is is interesting in that,
you know, it is it sparkles like like like nothing else,
you know. And uh, And of course since ancient times,
people have been coming across it, especially glimpsing it in
(05:23):
streams and riverbeds. Um. So humans have a long history
with gold. And so in order to research a bit
about about humanity's history working with gold, UM, I looked
to a book I frequently turned to, the seventy grade
Inventions of the Ancient World by Brian and Fagan, which
has a number of different um UH selections in there
(05:45):
where he's dealing with with specific technological advancements from the
ancient world and generally UM partnering with a particular expert
UH in a related field. UH. The Fagan, of course,
has has written quite a bit ancient technology just in general.
There are a lot of academic papers out there, and
we've referred to some of them on the show before.
(06:06):
So as pointed out by Brian and Fagin and Palti Cradic,
who specializes in ancient metal technology, gold pops up relatively
late in the archaeological record of the Old World. While
evidence of copper dates back to the eighth millennium b
C in the Middle East, gold doesn't pop up until
five thousand BC in what is now Bulgaria, and it
(06:29):
pops up in the Americas during the second millennium BC. Now,
the oldest gold artifacts that we we know of our
Neolithic artifacts from a cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, and it's
a variety of gold adornments, including ringlets, discs, and necklaces.
Joe I included a photo here for you to look at.
But if anyone else out there wants to see this themselves,
(06:51):
just do a search for Varna v A r in
a gold or gold artifacts and you'll see the skeleton
and these various gold implements that we're buried with them. Now,
is this image we're seeing Do you know if this
is actually as it was found, like institute or has
this been arranged for this? This particular photo looks arranged. Um.
(07:13):
I've seen some some photographs of it as they actually
pulled it from the earth, and uh and and it's
it's really interesting because of course the gold is very
very shiny like it's instantly recognizable as gold. Now, gold
is almost always found as a metal rather than an ore.
It typically contains five to silver and it was originally
(07:33):
used without refining it sometimes with copper added. But then
in the with the introduction of gold coinage in the
seventh century BC, and this would have been in um
lydia Um. This this introduced new requirements. You needed guaranteed weight,
you needed guaranteed purity. Thus refining was necessary to separate
the silver from the gold. And the process here is
(07:56):
um is parting by which gold dust or foil is
heated in a pot with salt. So's we got a
stew going baby, Yeah, pretty much. Uh, this is what
uh Fagan and Cratic had to say to summarize this quote.
The chlorine and ferric chloride vapors so generated removed the
(08:17):
silver from the gold as volatile silver chloride, leaving behind
pure gold. Okay, So it was creating a chemical reaction
with the I guess the sodium chloride in the salt,
where the silver under the heating would bond with the
chlorine and it would evaporate off. Yeah. And so as
(08:37):
gold coin spread, so too did this method of refinement.
And it wouldn't change for roughly two thousand years and
long and for longer in other parts of the world,
but certainly in regard to you know, Europe and the Mediterranean,
the Middle East, you know, it would be two thousand
years before uh it changed much. Now a note, simple
cast and beaten gold can be accomplished without specialized metal tools.
(09:02):
More sophisticated gold working wasn't possible to the Bronze age
um by in the near East. Now, meanwhile, in South America,
UM gold workers there didn't refine the gold, but they
were able to control the composition by adding via hammering
or casting, copper to the natural gold silver alloy to
(09:23):
produce a metal called tumbaga. And what they do is
they take it and they treat the surface with a
stringent chemicals to oxidize the copper, and then they would
they would remove this with strong brine or perhaps acidic
fruit juices, and then they would burnish the surface to
create a resplendent finish. I didn't realize there'd be so
much food like processes in the creation of this jewelry.
(09:48):
Is it true that um the copper involved when you're
mixing copper with gold or with silver and gold, the
copper helps strengthen it and make it less malleable because
gold in its natural metallic form is actually quite soft,
isn't it. Yeah? Yeah, And that's that's that's interesting because
that comes up as as being one of the one
of the reasons why we see gold used as in
(10:11):
jewelry throughout the through human history. I mean, for starters.
It's beautiful, and we'll get into some of the symbolic
reasons for its beauty uh and wyant catches our eye.
But also what else are you going to use gold for?
You know, you you can't really make a useful gold
tool because it's going to to bend and uh and
it's it's it's just not going to hold up to
(10:31):
the pressures required. Likewise, you can't make a gold sword
that's going to be sharp enough and strong enough to
use in combat. Um, but it lends itself well to
pure decoration or to decorating a particularly important sword or
its hilth anyway, uh, that sort of thing. Now, I
think gold would actually become practically useful in ways that
couldn't necessarily have been predicted earlier once we get into
(10:54):
the age of electronics, because gold, of course has very
important conductive proper these. Yeah. It's interesting how for for
so much of human history, gold is this thing that
is absolutely valuable and uh and desired and is used
you know as a means of of of trading with
other people and and and determining wealth, and yet it
(11:15):
didn't really have any uses for the most part. Uh. Well,
there's some exceptions to that, but no really uses until
we get into the modern world where we can actually
look at electronic uses for gold. Now. One of the
advantages of gold, and one one of the reasons that
it's always been favored as a jewelry metal, is that
it is that gold occurs as nuggets, dust, or veins
and does not have to be converted from complex mineral ors.
(11:38):
Deposits of gold can also be hunted out via spotting.
Those glittering specks of gold and rivers and streams um
very eye catching. And the reason for this is interesting
because gold is also highly resistant to chemical tarnishing or corrosion,
and that's why gold can spend thousands of years exposed
in a stream bed uh and remain visible. Yeah, I
(12:00):
mean many other metals naturally lose their luster when they're
just exposed to the atmosphere. You know, they react with
gases in the air or with water. Of course, you
would notice how quickly iron rusts. I mean, iron that's
exposed to the air does not maintain a lustrous finish
for very long at all. And the same is true
of all kinds of metals that you would commonly encounter
(12:21):
in the world. They can take on a kind of
dull appearance pretty quickly through reaction just with what's around them,
and and people in the ancient world noticed this, they
picked up on this and uh, and as you can imagine,
various ideas became attached to it, as as Fagin points
out in another section of the book, with Jack Ogden,
author of nine two's Jewelry in the Ancient World, quote,
(12:43):
a gold vessel did not ruin the taste of the
soup in life, and could remain buried with its deceased
owner to serve them in the afterlife and even perhaps
transfer some of the metal's longevity. Yeah, so you can
imagine how the the the idea of gold in some
ways symbolizing purity or or harmony or or permanence, is
(13:04):
not just because it looks pretty. It's because of the
chemical properties that keep it looking pretty. You know that
it doesn't tarnish and lose its luster the way other
metals do. And you you see various symbolism involved. To
a lot of times, silver is seen as the color
of the moon, but gold, of course, is the color
of the sun. And the ancient Egyptians even thought of
(13:27):
gold as the skin of raw or the skin of ray,
which is especially telling when you think of gold sheets
and foil and we'll get into that in a minute here. Um.
And and of course there are plenty of other examples
of gold and mythology that are pretty interesting. We have
to remember that in Greek mythology, Zeus himself becomes a
shower of gold in order to impregnate a mortal Oh yeah,
(13:50):
that's in the story of Dunay who is imprisoned by
her father, a Chrysius of Argos, and Zeus comes down
in the form of a shower of gold and they
can eve the child, who becomes Perseus. The uh, the
ostensible hero of the Perseus and Medusa story. But according
to our favorite retellings, maybe the villain of the story,
you know, depends on depends on the details. Now, one
(14:19):
of the interesting things about some of the other stories
of Greek mythology that involve gold is it easy to
just sort of dismiss it is like, okay, you make
something gold and then it's notable, right, A golden helmet, okay,
it's magic whatever. A golden fleece, sorry, it's like a
normal fleece, except it's golden. Well. Um, that may that
particular case may be connected to the use of fleece
unshared sheep hide to pan for gold and streams. Oh interesting, Yeah,
(14:44):
I'd never imagined that, though it's funny. I have thought
before about often when I'm cooking in the kitchen, a
thought that comes to my head is, uh, what did
ancient people use for a callander? But I guess I
guess cloth would be a pretty reasonable choice there, right, Yeah,
it would apparently cling to the to the uncheered, cheap hide.
(15:05):
Now another tale that we think I'll instantly think of
regarding gold and Greek mythology is, of course, the myth
of Midas is golden touch. Um. So King Midas a Phrygia.
The story goes, he finds this drunken satyr. Uh, just
like just really drunk, even for a satyr. I think
the satyr is drunk. It needs nursing back to health.
(15:26):
Now our sayer's obviously they're going to be party animals.
But are they party the kind of party animal that
can hold their liquor the kind that can't. Well, I'm
guessing they probably could, but they won't. You know, they're
because they're all about you know, excess. Right, Yeah, let's
cut loose. And of course their master is Dionysus and um,
(15:48):
and Midas recognizes this, and so you know, nurses nurses
his creature back to health, and then Dionysius offers him
a reward, and so Midas is like, well, I've got
pretty much everything I need. I'm I'm rich and all,
but I'm sure to love gold and I would like
to have more of it. And so the god gives
him the Golden Touch, and I think we all know
how the rest of the story goes. The main portion
of this story, of course, is that everything he touches
(16:09):
turns to gold, which is great until he goes to
grab some grapes to eat, until he throws himself on
his bed and it turns into unforgiving gold. I mean,
I guess it's better than if if your bed were
made out of iron, but still as far as like
things to sleep on, still not comfortable. And then when
he touches his own daughter, he turns her to solid gold.
(16:29):
So he goes back to Dionysus and says, hey, I
take it back, just I. I don't want this golden
touch anymore, and so Dionysus tells him to wash his
hands in the river Pactolus near the coast of modern Turkey.
And indeed the gold drains from his fingertips in the
moving water, So I think you can all see it
now moving water. Yes, there's apparently a connection here to
(16:51):
traditions of panning for gold as well. And indeed the
river in question wants contained electroum gold and silver, so
it was a river of rich And I know because
I just looked it up after having said something that
was totally wrong. Electrum is actually an alloy of gold
and silver that's may may have trace amounts of other
medals in it, such as copper. Yeah, for some reason,
(17:13):
I thought electrum was amber. I'm glad I stopped and checked. Yeah,
but I don't think I really knew about this connection.
I mean, I obviously one attaches themselves to the to
the basic message of the myth, you know, the sort
of you know, be careful what you wish for because
the reality of it could be a curse. But anyway,
(17:33):
this is this is right right interesting And if anyone
out there wants to see a really cool animated version
of this um the the the ted Ad series which
are draw all these animated educational shorts, they have one
on Midas that's uh, that's does a great job telling
the story and has some amusing visual choices. Yeah, uh yeah,
(17:53):
it's a great story that works on multiple levels. Obviously,
you have the you know, the standard monkeys Paul kind
of be careful what you wish for inter protation. It
works on that level. It works in saying you know,
there's more to life than riches, of course, but then
it also I think it works pretty well as an
illustration of the ways that we can become alienated and
deranged by over dedication to the acquisitive process, you know,
(18:17):
like if you are overly focused on acquiring money, Like
I think it's quite clear that this has potential to
ruin other aspects of your life. Absolutely. Now. Ogden and
Fagin point out that the Near East had advanced gold
working techniques so for the ancient world, such as gold
wire chain soldering by two thousand BC, but it didn't
(18:40):
pick up in China until the mid first millennium BC,
when it was possibly introduced via Russia. Um Jewelry craftsmanship
in China mainly revolved around another difficult material, jade, which
was essentially unknown in the Mediterranean. In the Eastern World,
it wasn't traded much, and jade was also used in
True America by one thousand BC. This is interesting, I'm
(19:04):
reminded of. We just recently recorded a couple of episodes
about the Shanhaijing, the ancient mythic geography of the regions
of China, and if you just flip through that, it
seems to me like the minerals most often mentioned when
they're calling out different mountains and seas are real gar
and cinnabar. Yeah, and and then then jade is mentioned
(19:25):
a lot as well as desirable. Now, pure gold is
one thing, but throughout history gold crafts people have also
turned to gold plating or gold you know, guilding. But
it wasn't until that we see more durable guilding techniques
that don't depend on just simply gluing it in place
or bending the gold foil around things. And of course
(19:46):
one of the big advantages of this is, you know,
you don't have to try and craft something out of
just gold. You can have something made out of it,
more durable metal, something made out of wood, and you
can put the gold around it, and you know, this
is the kind of craftmanship we see in a lot
of gold artifacts that make to mind when you think
about golden wonders now. Ogden and Fagin also point out
that the application of gold foil to silver and copper
(20:08):
was largely superseded in Roman times and earlier in China
by a process known as amalgam gilding. So what you
do is you mix gold with mercury and slathered this
all over the metal, and then you heat it up
and the mercury is driven off in a vapor, leaving
the gold coating. That sounds like that may have created
some health problems for some ancient metal workers. Yeah, yeah,
(20:30):
the mercury vapors um to be avoided. Um. Now, Now,
the Romans also used imitation gold made from copper zinc
alloys and they would just polish this up to a
high shine. Now, another gold purification process, popular in Europe
in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is known as cupulation.
And to understand this, we have to turn back to silver,
the moon metal. So silver was used in the Middle
(20:54):
East since the fifth millennium BC, but on a much
smaller scale, and at this stage they would have viewed
native silver occurring in rich silver ores that could be
directly smelted. But most silver is found in lead ore,
so you needed a different method. Yeah, I believe this
stuff was referred to as galena. You can see this
coming up in ancient texts. I think we also talked
(21:15):
about it in our Cupids, Lead and Narrow episode. But
galena was this naturally occurring mineral form of lead, I
think the lead sulfide. But this ore was a really
important source of silver in the ancient world. So cupulation
as a process emerges seems like somewhere around a thousand BC.
During the process of lead oar is heated to about
(21:36):
two thousand and twelve degrees fahrenheit or eleven degrees celsius,
and this oxidizes the lead um to lead oxide uh
into quote cratic and fake and quote which either blew away,
poisoning everyone around, or formed a molten mass of of
of letharge. And then the silver is what remains. And
it's interesting. Plenty of the Elder described this process in
(21:59):
the Natural History. This is from book thirty three, and
this is the Rackham translation. By the way, quote after
these details, let us speak about the varieties of silver
ore the next madness of mankind. Silver is only found
in deep shafts and raises no hopes of its existence
by any signs giving off no shining sparkle, such as
(22:19):
are seen in the case of gold. The ore is
sometimes red, sometimes ash colored. It cannot be smelted except
when combined with lead, or with the vein of lead
called galena lead ore, which is usually found running near
veins of silver ore. Also, when submitted to the same
process of firing, part of the ore precipitates as lead,
(22:39):
while the silver floats on the surface like oil on water.
Oh what a beautiful image there. Uh this this occurs
in the same section. I just have to read this
to it. This has to do with with gold and
mercury because this is also from plenty same translation quote.
There is also a mineral found in these veins of
silver which contains a humor in round drops that is
(23:02):
always liquid and is called quicksilver. It acts as a
poison on everything and breaks vessels by penetrating them with
malignant corruption. All substances float on its surface except gold,
which is the only thing that it attracts to itself. Consequently,
it is also excellent for refining gold, as if it
is briskly shaken in earthen vessels, it rejects all the
(23:24):
impurities contained in it. Now, would this be referring to
liquid mercury here, Yes, I believe so. Yeah, you can
imagine the little of the little round drops of it.
You know. Uh, you shouldn't play with liquid mercury because
it can be highly toxic. But I have to say,
when I was a kid, I took a part of
thermostat one time and I got it the old style
(23:45):
mercury switch, and boy that was fun to play with,
even though you shouldn't. Well, I never got to play
with it, but my my my dad was a dentist,
and so I remember him showing me some mercury at
one point and it was really cool. Yeah. Now, in
medieval Africa, another method of gold purification was in use.
And this is really interesting, um because it involves glass.
(24:07):
So it is detailed by Mark Walton, co director of
the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts and discussed
in the Atlas Obscura article. Medieval Africans had a unique
process for purifying gold with glass. By Evan Nicole Brown.
What they did is they took or and other raw
materials typically found in rivers and mixed it with glass
before heating it up. So glass, you wouldn't have thought
(24:29):
of that, yeah, I I wouldn't have. So gold is inert.
So while the various impurities and other materials melted into
the glass, the gold remained. And so Walton's team here
they used sand, gold dust, and recycled glass to reproduce
the same process. It's pretty neat. Yeah. Apparently the context
of this ancient process was that it was taking place
(24:51):
at a West African site known as tad Mecca, which
is now in the Republic of Molly. All right, well,
let's turn now to the subject of gold nanoparticles, and
and this would the term gold nano particles, of course,
would seem to be on the surface entirely connected with
the modern age of gold, right, in which the skin
of raw or the skin of ray has come to
(25:12):
serve humans in in ways beyond mere luster and monetary worth. Right. Well,
anything now with the prefix nano's smacks of like the
modern technological age, you know, the idea of nanotechnology. But
of course, another way of looking at nanotechnology or nanoparticles
is that you can just say, well, there's small particles
of something that can be suspended in a liquid, which
(25:33):
in some cases have existed for hundreds or thousands of years, Yeah,
all you need is a particle of matter that is
between one and one hundred nanometers in diameter, so that
that in and of itself is by no means a
modern reality, exclusively a modern reality, and the same can
certainly be said of gold nanoparticles. So. An author by
the name of Chai Chan wrote an excellent article for
(25:54):
Science History Institutes Distillations back in two thousand and eight
titled from Nanotech to Nanoscience, and in it, the author
points out that despite the terms popular emergence in the
nineteen seventies and eighties, there are plenty of much older
technologies that make use of what we think of today
as nanotechnology, and um, I'm not going to mention them
all here, but there's one that concerns gold, right, And
(26:16):
I think this was actually the example that Kate brought
up an email that inspired us to talk about this today. Yeah.
So briefly, what it consisted of is during the sixt
seventeenth and eighteen centuries, medieval artisans added gold chloride to
molten glass to give it a red tint, and they
added silver nitrate to turn it yellow. And recent scientific
(26:37):
analysis has revealed that this process works because of gold
and silver nanoparticles in the glass, reflecting red and yellow
light acting as quantum dots. So some examples of what
I guess we would call Renaissance stained glass actually did
involve nanotechnology, right. So it's something to keep in mind
because the occasional like if you hear someone say, well,
(26:58):
you know those demand ask A steel swords that they
used during the Crusades, those had those had carbon nanotubes
in them, you know. So if you hear that, don't think, oh, well,
this is clearly an ancient alien garbage. No, no it's not.
You don't need um like modern science to get things
like carbon nanotubes and gold nanoparticles. Right. Maybe we'll have
(27:22):
to come back to Damascus steel sometime. Yeah, I think
I think we should. It would at the very least
would make a fun artifact, I think than now. Another
place that you often see gold nanoparticles brought up these
days is in the realm of medicine, especially experimental or
(27:42):
cutting edge medicine. Uh. And there's one story I came
across that was pretty interesting. I'm not sure how it
has held up since the time it was published, but
I have to mention it for some reasons that will
become obvious. What about injections of gold nanoparticles as a
form of contraception. This has a King Midacy kind of
feel to it already. Yeah, So there is an original
(28:05):
study here that I want to mention by win Ching
Lee at all published in Nano Letters. In uh it's
fairly technical. So I'm relying here mostly on a summary
right up, done at the time for Nature Materials by
one of my favorite science writers, Philip Ball, who writes
a lot of good articles about physics and chemistry. And
Ball opens by saying, you know, there are a number
(28:26):
of potential uses for metallic nanoparticles in medicine, some that
are already being used, some that are being rolled out
as we speak. But one of the more interesting and
commonly explored options at the time of this study was
to use metallic nanoparticles inside the body as antennae to
(28:47):
receive quote sub optical electromagnetic signals. So little metal nanoparticles
in the body working as an antenna to receive infrared,
microwave or radio sign knolls or magnetic fields. And one
thing this does is enable what Ball calls quote highly
localized heating by wireless means. So just one weird and
(29:11):
quite fascinating example that the Ball brings up. There is
a study by Huang at All called remote control of
ion channels and neurons through magnetic field heating of nanoparticles,
published in Nature Nanotechnology in two thousand ten, and ball
summary of the study goes like this quote. Manganese fair
(29:31):
righte nanoparticles six nanometers across fixed next to calcium ion
channels in vivo, meaning in the living organism. In the
nematode worm keen or hebditis elegans were used to trigger
firing of neurons in response to a radio frequency magnetic field,
altering the direction of motion of the entire organism. So
(29:54):
potentially the control of the behavior of an animal like
a worm by in injecting metallic nanoparticles and then heating
them up with a wireless signal. And Ball also points
out that using similar techniques uh in a paper by
Stanley at All, there was a report that researchers were
able to control calcium triggered insulin release in mice. So
(30:18):
you can imagine that if you could use heating of
nanoparticles or communication with metallic nanoparticles, especially at localized organs
within the body through wireless remote control signals. This could
be extremely useful in medicine. So by the time of
this study, there is a precedent for using radio or
infrared signaling to control metallic nanoparticles injected within the body,
(30:42):
often by heating them up, and this could be used
to do all kinds of things such as like targeted
thermal destruction of cancer cells, which is I think still
a live possibility in many cases. But this study by
Lee at All used the heating of injected metallic like
nanoparticles for a different purpose, which was to induce sterility
(31:04):
in male mice. What that means is the study design
involved injecting gold nano rods into rodent testicles and then
heating them with near infrared radiation, and the researchers in
this study suggested that a method like this could potentially
be useful as a contraceptive for animals such as household
(31:25):
pets uh And there are several reasons that they argue
in its favor. One is that allegedly, despite involving gold,
it is a very very tiny amount of gold. It
would be very cheap, especially cheap compared to you know,
expensive surgical techniques, so it would not involve surgery. It
would be controllable, meaning potentially non permanent, depending on how
(31:46):
much heating of the testicular tissue you do. Apparently higher
levels of heating would render permanent sterility, but lower levels
of heating appear somewhat effective at just creating a temporary
contraceptive effect. And also the they argue that, hey, gold
nanoparticles appear to be basically non toxic within a million bodies. Well,
(32:08):
you know how VET bills are. I if I were
to go to the vat end that were to tell
me I need you to literally put gold inside this animal,
I would be like, yeah, that sounds about right. But
but on the serious, serious note, if it we're you know,
less invasive, and we are talking about a very small,
tiny amount of gold, I could see this working. Yeah.
(32:29):
But of course, as I was saying, the import of
this research is not just in the specific use case
they're describing. Of course, heat in mail gonads will inhibit
sperm production. Um. But but Ball notes once again quote
because heat will inhibit sperm production, it seemed natural to
extend earlier work on nanoparticle based photothermal treatment of cancer
(32:50):
cells to this application. So He's drowing the connection there
between the use and treatment of of appelation of cancer cells,
of destruction of cancerous tissue through through remote heating of
these metallic nanoparticles, to the destruction of sperm cells. And
of course gold is a fairly nonreactive metal. It is
mostly nonreactive within the body, so injections of gold were
(33:13):
at least believed at the time to be relatively non toxic.
I was poking around, and that seems to gold is
still from what I can tell, believed to be relatively
non toxic as far as internal metals go in the body.
Of course, there could be some things I didn't come across,
so I'm not saying like you will just go consume
a bunch of gold. Now. Another thing that you have
(33:33):
to worry about if you are injecting something into the
body is how will the immune system respond? And Ball
rights that according to this study, UH coding the gold
nanoparticles in polyethylene glycol quote enables them to evade the
immune system. Lead All found that peg coated gold nano
rods about forty nanometers long injected into the test ees
(33:55):
of male mice could raise the temperature up to forty
five degrees c when irradiated with an infrared laser. Uh. Now,
I guess you're wondering, like, would this be painful? Apparently,
it would not take a painful amount of heat to
be effective. Quote. The degree of heating, although not unduly uncomfortable,
essentially destroyed the test ees and suppressed spermato genesis permanently.
(34:18):
But milder heating meaning lower irradiation intensity, impaired sperm production
only temporarily. And they also showed that that the mice
that it had the temporary thing appeared to regain normal
reproductive function after some time had elapsed, and that there
were no major changes in their behavior like eating or
aggression or sexual activity after the treatment. So they say
(34:42):
that at least in this state, the procedure appeared probably
safe and effective, But of course they're they're always the caveats.
Ball notes that it's not clear whether the nano rods
are ultimately voided from the body. Quote the concentration and
the testes and epididymis declined over time, but the particles
seemed to accumulate in the spleen and liver when obviously
(35:03):
wonders about an extension to humans. That's certainly the author's
long term goal, and they are confident that it should
work in theory. It's just it's it is kind of um.
It is interesting to think about when we think back
to that myth of Zeus's golden shower and how um
you know that enables him to reproduce with a human
and here we're talking about similar We're talking about golden
(35:26):
particles being used, uh, to prevent reproduction from taking place. Yeah. Now,
I looked around and I haven't seen much follow up
from this idea since the study was published in And
I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if
that means people have looked into it and it is
not such a hot idea after all, no pun intended,
or maybe it's just waiting for somebody to do some
(35:47):
more follow up research. I'm not sure. But assuming the
basic method is sound, even if it were never like
extended experimentally to humans or anything, the authors are trying
to make the case that hey, having a less invasive
method for effect to contraception on animals such as household
pets and domestic animals could be extremely useful. If you
know you have a you have a cheaper, less invasive
(36:08):
method of rendering household pets sterile. That would be a
good thing for the world. Yeah, I just don't want
anybody then stealing my cat and trying to melt down
for her gold, her precious gold. But whether or not
gold based thermal contraception for humans or other animals, whatever
actually go anywhere. Gold nanoparticles show lots of promise in
(36:30):
all kinds of other medical research, especially as I was
saying earlier, in things like the treatment of cancer. Gold
nanoparticles tend to be strong candidates for use within the body,
again because they can be used for all kinds of
diagnostics and targeting of specific tissues. But they're thought to
be relatively non toxic and tolerated by the immune system.
If you just do searches on the medical literature, tons
(36:52):
of stuff about gold nanoparticles studies will will come up.
There are tons of them. But just to pick one
example of this kind of thing that I came cross,
this is from a couple of years ago, published by
A Restinahad at All in two thousand nineteen in p
n A s Gold nanoshell Localized photothermal ablation of prostate
tumors in a clinical pilot device study. So this is
(37:15):
looking at using gold nanoparticles to allow the thermal destruction
like targeted heating of cancerous tissues within the prostate gland
or around the prostate gland heating of that through directed
near infrared light. And this kind of thing seems to
be a pretty promising method for destroying cancer cells without
(37:36):
harming the rest of the body too much. And the
authors point out that this thing can be really important
for UH for cancers such as prostate cancer, because prostate
cancer tends to well, as they write quote, the prostate
is near several vital structures such as the urethra, neurovascular
bundle UH and whole gland treatments for prostate cancer can
(37:57):
disrupt normal urinary bowel and set actual functioning. So having
some kind of ultra focal method for destroying the cancerous
tissue without harming too much of the surrounding tissue is
especially useful for organs like this within the body. And
this isn't the only one. There are other organs like this,
So of course I have to wonder if we're at
an age of of dawning, you know, gold nanoparticle or
(38:20):
otherwise metallic nanoparticle based treatments and diagnostics throughout the medical world.
How will this manifest in science fiction adaptations of the
Mida Smith? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of I mean
the myth itself, Like we're saying, it's so many ways
to interpret it and look at it. It's already right
for just continual reevaluation, but now we have new ways
(38:41):
to think about the material central to a new ways
to think about gold, new uses for gold. Yeah, it
turns everything on its head. And of course I also
love the idea of a god taking on the form
of gold nanoparticles like that, that in and of itself
sounds pretty rad Well, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody
picks up on like the studies like the control of
a knee meta to behavior via injection of those weren't
(39:02):
gold nanoparticles but metallic nanoparticles to like heat it and
make it move one direction rather than another. Surely somebody
will take that idea way too far. Yeah, I mean
in fiction, not in reality. I'm not saying somebody's going
to create a nanoparticle mind control device. Seems implausible at
the human level, by the way, Well, and as far
as just injected metal goes. I mean, two examples of
(39:24):
that from science fiction come to mind. There's, of course,
the one of the X Men movies. There's a scene
where prison guards injected with some sort of a metallic liquid,
which then enables Magneto to manipulate him. Too much iron
in your blood? Yes, yeah, pretty good? Sing? Is that
a call? I was that? I guess it was X
two x two. Yeah, that was the one that was
(39:44):
one of Brian Cox in it. That that was, Oh,
he's so great. But then also on the the animated
series the Legend of Cora, which involves earth beenders, firebenders,
water benders, but then of one variety of earth benders
or metal benders who essentially have magneto like control over metals.
Uh so there's manipulation of metallic based poisons within the
(40:05):
human body, which are are pretty interesting. But I don't
recall them bending gold at any point. It could be wrong.
Maybe maybe it happens in like some of the comic
books or something, but so I don't know Avatar Legend
of Cora fans out there, if there's gold bending going on,
let me know about it. Hey, explain the whole bender thing.
To me, I've never watched Avatar. I don't I don't
(40:26):
know what it is, though I've seen people on the
internet talking about Airbenders and other kind of benders. What
are the benders? Okay, Well, first of all, Um, Avatar
is a tremendous show. Avatar the Last Airbender is just
really great. I didn't watch it until this summer and
I watched it with the family, and it's just just wonderful,
just a great show. Started to finish and in Legend
of Kor is the sequel to it. But basically in
(40:47):
this world, which is like a uh, you know based
it's it's not our world. It's some sort of a
you know, alien parallel type of world with a lot
of hybrid creatures. But and it's also based in in
a large part on Asian cultures and Asian mythologies. But
you have people selected, you know, I guess, kind of
the mutants who are born with the ability to control
(41:10):
with their mind and with their body certain elements, so
like firebenders can move fire around and use fire magic essentially, Um.
And then you have water benders, the Airbenders, and then
the earth Benders, and this factors into like nationalities and politics,
and then you have somebody that is the Avatar, and
the Avatar is like the like the I guess they're
(41:32):
like a Bodhi Softva or something. You know, they're um there.
There's only one at a time, and there's like reincarnation involved,
and they are able to bend all the elements and
are supposed to be a force of balance in the world.
So why is there a last Airbender? Well, because of
the the politics and the nationalities. So the Fire Nation
(41:53):
tries to wipe out the Air Nation and they thought
they had achieved it because the different the different Avatar
is born in a different nation. So like one generation,
the avatar is born a Firebender and then has to
and then learns to use the other bending powers. But
then the next Avatar, the next reincarnation, will be born
(42:13):
with you know, with a different starting ability. Wouldn't that
be suicidal though? If the Fire Nation wipes out the
Air Nation, because the fire needs air in order to
you know, sustain itself exactly, And that's why you needed
an Avatar to come around and bring balance back to
the world. I see. But also the show is especially avatar.
It's also really funny. It has some great humor in it,
so it's not it's not all like just serious, but
(42:35):
it balances those two things. Well, it's it's it can
be really funny, it can be cute, but it can
also be very seriously minded, has great drama. It's it's
really one of the best animated series I've ever seen.
This episode paid for by the Last Airbender. Yeah, yeah,
I mean not really, but yeah, okay, you've convinced me. Yeah,
it's going on the list at least. All Right, Well,
(42:56):
I guess that's it for for Gold though. That's all
the gold been thing we're gonna do today. But obviously
Gold will continue to come up again, either as a
material related to something we're talking about. I'm sure it'll
come up in future part of Fact episodes and who know,
you know, we could come back and discuss the electronic
side of gold in the future. Oh yeah, absolutely, Maybe
we'll do a weird house cinema that involves gold. I'm
(43:18):
sure there are plenty of things to choose from. There's
a movie that's right at the tip of my tongue,
but I can't think of what it is. It's got
a gold monster. Well, there's the Hideous Sun Demon and
then I think there's some sort of there's doctor there's
doctor Goldfoot in the Big Machine Machine. That's what I'm thinking.
Not a gold monster at all. The Doctor Goldfoot in
(43:39):
the Bikini Machine is a movie where Vincent Price has
a big machine that's like the like quiz nose of
them that you stick the sandwich in, except what comes
out of it. As like I think Ladies and Bikini's.
Frankie Avalon's in that. Yeah, he plays a secret agent.
It's a comedy. It's like a parody film of James
Bond type stuff. So he's this is the comedic gold
(43:59):
thing basically. All right, all right, well maybe we'll put
it on the list. In the meantime, if you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
just remember core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday's Artifact on
Wednesday's Listener Mail on Monday's Friday. That's our time to
do a little weird house cinema where we we put
most of the science aside and we just focus on
a cinematic weirdness, one film at a time. Uh. And
(44:22):
you can find the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
feed wherever you get your podcast wherever that happens to
be if they give you the power to do so.
We just asked that you rate, review, and subscribe Huge
Things as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
(44:43):
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, this is the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
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