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Catch the dust, real gold as light as air

The foam resembles a conventional nugget of gold. It looks like gold, it has a metallic shine, and it has a 20 carat rating (a carat is a unit of mass, used to assess precious stones and metals.) While the nugget may look like regular gold, it isn’t. The nugget is so light it can float on the steamy milk froth on top of a cup of cappuccino. Picked up by hand, the nugget is also malleable, allowing it to be folded into different shapes.

The nugget is a a three-dimensional mesh of gold. The reason it is so light is because it’s mainly composed of pores and the pores contain air. The resultant material is a type of aerogel. An aerogel is “a synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas.” The end product is some thousand times lighter than conventional gold alloys. This means it is lighter than water and close to being as light as air. The ratio is 98 parts air to two parts gold.

The process of creating the gold, as indicated in a research note, consisted of heating milk proteins. This created manometer-fine protein fibers (termed amyloid fibrils.) The fibrils were then dipped into a solution of gold salt. The fibers then formed a structure whereby gold crystallized into small particles, creating a gel-like gold fiber network.

Potential applications for the gold foam include catalysts, sensors, watches and jewelry. Due to the tiny nanoparticles, the research group can also change the color of gold, from the characteristic ‘gold’ color to an dark-red.

The super light gold foam was invented at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), a university that specializes in engineering. The discovery has been reported to the journal Advanced Materials, with the paper titled “Amyloid Templated Gold Aerogels.”

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Written By

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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