@bethejuggernaut: No, this isn’t science fiction: San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion says it just created lab-made gold. For millennia, philosophers have mused about creating gold from lead or mercury. Scientists have since attempted it. In 1941, Harvard researchers produced radioactive gold from mercury. In 2025, CERN said it created 29 trillionths of a gram of gold from lead between 2015 and 2018, but the gold nuclei survived only fractions of a second. Now, Marathon Fusion claims it has converted mercury into stable gold at 10 times CERN’s rate. Mercury has 80 protons in its nucleus, while gold has 79. To make gold from mercury, you need to remove or transform one proton from a mercury atom. Marathon says it used neutrons generated by nuclear fusion to transform mercury into a radioactive form. As the mercury decays, one of its protons becomes a neutron, turning that atom into gold. The claims haven’t been independently verified and Marathon hasn’t disclosed how much gold it produced or at what cost. But if its tech becomes commercially viable, the implications are enormous. In 2025, gold reached record highs. Lab-made gold could put downward pressure on prices — impacting everyone from miners and wholesalers to gold investors. India is the world’s second-largest gold market after China. In 2025, Indians purchased about 430.5 metric tons of gold jewelry, according to the World Gold Council, with total demand at $52 billion. In 2023, Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski founded Marathon Fusion to develop tech primarily for nuclear fusion plants. The company’s investors include Anglo American, the mining giant that owns a majority stake in the diamond company De Beers. Marathon estimates a commercial fusion plant could produce up to five metric tons of gold a year per gigawatt of electric capacity. But the technology remains years away from commercial deployment. Read our gold story here: https://www.thejuggernaut.com/burglaries-targeting-south-asians-in-united-states

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Sunday 25 October 2026 19:36:13 GMT