Photo courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory
Originally posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2014
Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently identified the world’s largest single crystal gold nugget, worth an estimated $1.5M (for its rarity rather than its 217.78-gram weight).
Los Alamos reports:
Revealing the inner structure of a crystal without destroying the sample—imperative, as this one is worth an estimated $1.5 million—would allow Rakovan and Lujan Center collaborators to prove that this exquisite nugget, which seemed almost too perfect and too big to be real, was a single crystal and hence a creation of nature. Its owner, who lives in the United States, provided the samples to Rakovan to assess the crystallinity of four specimens, all of which had been found decades ago in Venezuela.
Three of the four specimens assayed proved mono-crystalline.
Gold’s aesthetic appeal — inspiring even the scientific boffins at Los Alamos to rhapsodic words like “exquisite” — is a feature, not a bug. Gold’s beauty is one of the qualities that make gold optimal as the base of the world monetary system.
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