Is This Silicon Valley Startup the Next Sorcerer’s Apprentice? Find Out! 💰✨

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In a twist that would make Merlin raise an eyebrow and perhaps spill his morning tea, a Silicon Valley startup claims to have unearthed the holy grail of alchemy – transforming the utterly mundane mercury into the glitzy, glamorous gold.

The enterprise in question, Marathon Fusion—whose name sounds suspiciously like a contestant in an Olympic sport—proposes a rather audacious method involving nuclear fusion to metamorphose our friend mercury into a shiny gold nugget, as the Economic Times triumphantly reports.

According to their scientific manifesto, this clever bunch of innovators envisions using high-energy neutrons from a fusion reactor to bombard the mercurial Mercury-198. This grand assault reportedly turns it into Mercury-197, which then decays into stable Gold-197 faster than you can say “abracadabra!”

However, before anyone starts filling their pockets, they admit the entire affair is still more theory than practice, reminiscent of a magician’s trick that hasn’t quite made it past the rehearsal stage.

“Our approach,” they trumpet, “is economically irresistible, practically feasible, and massively scalable, contrary to previous efforts that were, shall we say, less than dazzling. An entirely new golden age begins now.” One can only imagine the sound of distant trumpets.

In a particularly imaginative claim, the manuscript—which remains unpeer-reviewed, much like a chef’s infamous soufflé—asserts that this precious gold can sprout like daisies at nuclear power stations “without any compromise to fuel self-sufficiency or power output.” How charmingly optimistic!

They forecast a time when 5,000 kilograms of gold might tumble forth annually from a one-gigawatt fusion power plant, leaving goldsmiths everywhere both giddy and thoroughly perplexed.

Co-founded by a former space engineer (one can only assume he was aiming for Mars before this little detour) and a Breakthrough Energy Fellow, Marathon Fusion has snagged a staggering $10.9 million in funds. This includes a delightful $5.9 million seed round in July 2024, led by those generous benefactors over at 1517 Fund and Anglo American, along with a little help from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, the Breakthrough Energy Fellows, Übermorgen Ventures, and the Shared Future Fund. Quite the bonanza!

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2025-07-27 21:06