Chris Campbell:

World’s Largest Atom Smasher Turned Lead Into Gold — and Then Destroyed It in an Instant

Medieval alchemists were obsessed with the idea of turning lead into gold, a concept known as chrysopoeia. But they may have had more luck swapping out the philosopher's stone for a particle accelerator, new results suggest.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, have revealed that some 86 billion gold nuclei were created during the accelerator's second run, between 2015 and 2018 — all from smashing together lead atoms at 99.999993% the speed of light.

The result is a tiny quantity of gold — amounting to just 29 trillionths of a gram — that then collides with the beam pipe and fragments in a fraction of a second. Yet even this near-instantaneous life and death showed up in the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) collaboration's detectors.

"It is impressive to see that our detectors can handle head-on collisions producing thousands of particles, while also being sensitive to collisions where only a few particles are produced at a time, enabling the study of rare electromagnetic 'nuclear transmutation' processes," Marco van Leeuwen, a spokesperson for ALICE, said in a statement.

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Ray Blanco:

Armored Venus Lander Crashes to Earth After 53 Years in Orbit

A potentially destructive Soviet Venus lander that was lost in space for over half a century has reentered the Earth's atmosphere. Tracked by various space agencies and individuals, the capsule crashed on May 10 somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

On May 10, 2025 at 06:24 GMT, the remnants of the Kosmos 482 probe entered the Earth's atmosphere. According to Roscosmos, the titanium capsule impacted somewhere over the eastern Indian Ocean about 248 miles (560 km) west of Middle Andaman Island and west of Jakarta, Indonesia.

Since dormant spacecraft re-enter the atmosphere on a regular basis, most are non-stories, but Kosmos 482 was something special. It was originally one of the Soviet Union's Venera series of probes intended to explore the planet Venus. 

However, shortly after launch on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan, the rocket suffered a malfunction that caused the spacecraft to break up and go into orbit around the Earth instead of heading for cloud-shrouded Venus.

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James Altucher:

Bitcoin Meets Gold: Sunny Ray on Tokenization’s Future

Sunny Ray is working on an incredible project involving Bitcoin and his company, Matador. They’re digitizing gold—turning it into crypto—and he’s a Bitcoin maximalist. 

That’s different from my stance: I think there are many crypto tokens that are useful for specific purposes. But Sunny’s view is clear—Bitcoin is the foundation.

In this episode of The James Altucher Show, Ray and I talk about what digital gold really means, why tokenization is so important, and how the biggest institutions in the world—like BlackRock—are embracing this shift. 

We also get into why exchanges are hard to use, the future of Ethereum, how gold works culturally in places like India, and why Matador is building its entire strategy on top of Bitcoin. Click the link below to dive in!

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