Once upon a time, transmutation of the elements was a really big deal. Alchemists drove their patrons near to bankruptcy chasing the philosopher’s stone to no avail, but at least we got chemistry out ...

The ALICE Collaboration is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for transforming lead into gold for a fraction of a second and exposing the strange physics that goes on inside the Large Hadron ...

For thousands of years, the practice of alchemy — chemically transforming minerals into gold — has been attempted and failed. While it is generally considered a pseudoscience by modern standards, ...

With Western roots in Ancient Egypt and Greece, the now-defunct scientific field of alchemy regularly consumed the thoughts of some of history’s greatest scientists. Luminaries such as Roger Bacon, ...

A few months ago Chemist Glenn Seaborg talked warmly of the compensations of his calling: “Stable employment, reasonably good pay, and considerably less pressure and worry than many other groups—such ...

A startup energy company, called Marathon Fusion, may soon be living out the dream of alchemists from the Middle Ages. In a recently released paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, the company ...

The dream of the ancient alchemists may come true as Marathon Fusion announces that its tokamak fusion reactor technology can turn common mercury into gold as a byproduct of fusion operations in ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Energy startup Marathon Fusion claims to have found a scalable way to turn mercury into gold, but they still have much to prove. Reading time 2 minutes Keep checking those gold prices—scientists have ...

A fusion energy startup claims to have found a way to turn mercury into gold. As the Financial Times reports, San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion says that the same process that could one day ...

Medieval alchemists toiled unsuccessfully to change lead into gold, but physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had better luck – though for only a microsecond. Instead of alchemy, ...