24-Karat Nuggets About Gold

Pure gold is so ductile (translation: stretchy), a single ounce of it can be drawn out into a thread 50 miles long without breaking (at which point it also would be too thin to see). If you did this to all of the existing gold in the world, it would wrap around the earth 11 million times.

- By Emily Goodman

13 Things:

1 PURE GOLD is so ductile (translation: stretchy), a single ounce of it can be drawn out into a thread 50 miles long without breaking (at which point it also would be too thin to see). If you did this to all of the existing gold in the world, it would wrap around the earth 11 million times.

2 CONTRARY TO popular belief, biting on gold is not a reliable way to tell whether it’s genuine— other metals are also soft enough to show teeth marks. And though many champs chomp down on their prizes, Olympic gold medals haven’t been made from that metal since the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm. Modern gold medals are mostly silver; those from the 2016 Games in Rio contained only 1.2 percent gold.

3 THE NOBEL Prize medal is still made of gold, though it was downgraded in 1980 when it went from 23 karats (24 is pure) to an 18-karat core coated in 23-karat gold. The gold in each medal is worth about $8,000.