25 INCREDIBLE FACTS ABOUT GOLD YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW

Gold is one of those seemingly mythical substances that somehow came to be equated with extreme value. Even during the Olympics the winning medal is always gold. Why is that? Out of all the metals in the universe why has gold become so valuable? Well, in many
ways it has been an interesting course of events that led gold to be considered so highly.
 For one, it is not the rarest metal, not by a long shot. That is not to say that gold isn’t rare…it’s probably even more rare than you think. But there are some elements that are inconceivably rare. As in you could barely find a handful of those elements on the Earth. And gold is not particularly interesting. It does not really react with any other elements.
 So what’s the deal? Well, the boringness of gold is actually what made it very useful as a currency. It was not too rare and it was not too abundant. It was not radioactive and it was not poisonous. From the few that are left (silver, platinum, e.t.c) gold has one distinction…it is yellow-ish.
 All the others are gray-ish. This means it stands out. And there you go. Gold became the currency of choice and although these days it is no longer used as currency (in most places) it has still retained its value (precisely because it does not’t react with other elements and therefore tarnish!).

Hence, the 25 crazy things you did not’t know about gold!
1. If you took all the gold out of the ocean, there would be enough for every person on Earth to have 9 pounds.
2.1 ton of old cell phones will give you more gold than 1 ton of gold ore.
3. To prevent the Nazis from confiscating them, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy melted down the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck. They were recast after the war.
4. Sailors often wore gold earrings so that if they drowned and washed up on the beach, the earrings would serve as payment for a proper Christian burial.
5. The Olympic gold medal is only 1% gold.
6. In Dubai, there are ATMs that dispense gold bars.
7. Most of the gold in Earth's crust was put there by asteroid strikes. Here’s our favorite: nearly all of the gold on Earth came from meteorites that bombarded the planet over 4 billion years ago during a 200 million year-long meteor shower. Forget for a moment that meteors rained down for 200 million years, but they rained down GOLD, of all elements. If wearing a gold, outer-space necklace souvenir was not cool enough already, check this out: scientists estimate that there’s enough gold on earth to cover the entire surface 12 feet deep in of pure gold. Sure beats the heck out of a snow day.

8. The vast majority of gold on Earth is in the core because it sank to the center while the Earth was forming.
9. Ice cream testers use gold spoons to avoid the after taste of using regular spoons.
10. The Roman politician, Gaius Gracchus, had a bounty put on his head for its weight in gold. The head was delivered but the bounty wasn't paid because the captor had filled his head with lead.
11. Aluminum used to be the most valuable metal on Earth. Rich people would dine with aluminum cutlery while poorer people would use gold.
12. Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, once spent so much gold in Egypt that he devalued it and nearly destroyed the economy.
13. Chinese prisoners are forced to mine gold in World of War craft. Some sources report nearly 100,000 virtual gold farmers throughout the country.
LEGO used to give its employees a 25.65 gram brick of gold for completing 25 years of service.
14. Gold is edible! You can eat your gold. Personally, I think there are plenty of better-tasting, cheaper foods that don’t count themselves among the rarest elements on earth. But some Asian countries do put gold in foods like fruit, coffee, and tea. But Asian countries aren’t the only ones doing it. Since around the 1500s, Europeans have been putting gold leaves in bottles of liquor like Goldschlager and Danziger Goldwasser. A few Native American tribes even believed that eating their gold could give them the power to levitate.  I guess that’s at least a good enough excuse to taste what all the fuss is about.
15. Gold has been found on every continent.
16. Gold is often forcibly extracted from water during earthquakes due to pressure deep within the Earth's crust.

17. The leaves of eucalyptus trees have been found to contain traces of gold.
18. Three Olympic sized swimming pools are capable of holding all the gold ever mined in human history.
19. Almost half of that gold has come from one location – Witwatersrand, South Africa.
20. Aurophobia is the fear of gold.
22. Indian housewives hold nearly 11% of the world's gold. That is more than the US, Switzerland, Germany, and the International Monetary Fund combined!
23. The largest gold bar in the world weighs 250 kg (551 pounds).
24. Your body contains about .2 mg of gold, mostly in your bloodstream.
25. Because of how rare and valuable gold is, most of the gold discovered throughout history is actually still in circulation in one form or another. It is thought however, that 80% of the world’s gold still remains underground. Time for another Gold Rush?