Golden opportunities
Elinor Hughes finds out how chemists are challenging a misconception about gold
Look inside a school chemistry textbook and you’ll find that gold only has a small section dedicated to it and it usually says something along the lines of: gold is a soft shiny metal, it is unreactive and alloys with silver or copper are used in jewellery and coins. But, there’s so much more to gold. It can be used to catalyse the process that occurs in catalytic converters and in a process to clean wastewater, for example. It even catalyses the reaction that deodorises toilets in Japan. So, why is gold generally considered to be unreactive?
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