Gold

BYD’s Yangwang U8L SUV is tricked out with the usual rotating 360 degrees on the spot and the ability to crab walk diagonally. But the fanciest party trick of them all is emergency flotation on water – in case your yacht ever failed on you.

Using a proprietary chemical process pioneered by Canadian firm Excir, England's The Royal Mint has begun mining old circuit boards from electronic devices for gold and converting what's harvested into attractive, if pricey, jewelry.

Graphene is the Novak Djokovic of materials – it’s so damn talented that it’s getting boring celebrating each new victory. But an exciting new upstart is challenging graphene’s title. Meet goldene, a 2D sheet of gold with its own strange properties.

A new method for recovering high-purity gold from discarded electronics is paying back US$50 for every dollar spent, according to Swiss researchers – who found their all-important gold-filtering substance in cheesemaking, of all places.

Preventing or clearing ice build-up on surfaces is a major winter problem, as some areas are currently experiencing. Scientists at KAIST have now developed a new thin film coating made of gold nanorods that can passively melt ice using just sunlight.

While anti-fog sprays work to a certain extent, warming a glass surface is a better way of keeping it fog-free. A new coating material is designed to do so, and it utilizes light-absorbing gold nanoparticles instead of electricity.

Discarded electronics can be a gold mine – literally. Researchers have developed an efficient new way to use graphene to recover gold from electronic waste, without needing any other chemicals or energy.

Currently, if you wish to track the electrical activity of someone's muscles, you have stick electrodes onto their skin. An experimental new technology, however, simply utilizes conductive fabric that's incorporated into washable pieces of clothing.

E-waste is a major environmental hazard, full of valuable metals. Engineers at Rice University have now shown that precious metals and rare earth minerals can be recovered by flash-heating ground-up electronics with a zap of electricity.

Researchers at Brown University have developed a new way to make super-hard metals, up to four times harder than usual. The team made nanoparticle “building blocks” that could be fused together under pressure, thanks to a chemical treatment.

The colorful glaze on that ceramic mug of yours may look nice, but there's a chance that it could contain toxic substances. US scientists have thus created a safer type of glaze, that incorporates tiny particles of silver and gold.

With gold, beauty and weight are two sides of the same coin. Now, by mixing it with plastic instead of other metals, researchers have created a new form of gold with as little as one-10th the usual weight, but retaining the same purity.