Money does grow on trees: Gold found in tree leaves, leads to vast hidden underground deposits:
In Australia, scientists have found money growing on trees. Not paper money, of course, but eucalyptus leaves that are imbued with small amounts of pure gold. These gilded leaves can help gold exploration companies discover new, underground gold deposits in difficult-to-reach locations.
The research, carried out by Melvyn Lintern at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and friends, discovered that trees in Australia and elsewhere in the world can be used to locate gold deposits that are more than 30 meters (100 feet) below the surface. Small amounts of gold are dissolved in water, which is then sucked up by tree roots. These particles eventually find themselves deposited in the leaves of the trees (the red dots in the image above).
Sadly, we’re talking about very small quantities of gold. Lintern says you would need to harvest 500 trees growing over a gold deposit to be able to make a gold ring. In scientific terms, we’re talking about a gold concentration of just 100 parts-per-billion in leaves, and about 50 ppb in twigs. To discover such tiny concentrations you can’t just use a conventional microscope: The Australian scientists had to use a synchrotron, a vast room-sized machine that uses X-rays to map the various elements present in a sample.
