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Friday, November 23, 2012 Kelvin Doe, a self-taught 15-year-old inventor from Sierra Leone, shows the THNKR viewers how he builds a DIY battery.
Help foster innovation among gifted children like Kelvin through Innovate Salone: http://www.crowdrise.com/InnovateSalone
Saturday, May 12, 2012 NASA Ames, the SETI institute and other organizations are combing the mountainous region for pieces of the Sutter's Mill Meteor that lit up the sky over the area on April 22, 2012.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 ;)
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Earthshine and Venus Over Sierra de Guadarrama
Image Credit: Daniel Fernández (DANIKXT)
Explanation: What just above that ridge? The Moon. Specifically, the Earth's Moon was caught just above the horizon in a young crescent phase. The familiar Moon might look a bit odd as the exposure shows significant Earthshine -- the illumination of the part of the Moon hidden from direct sunlight by the sun-reflecting Earth. Also captured in the image is the bright planet Venus on the right. Venus and Jupiter passed only three degrees from each other last week during a photogenic planetary conjunction. The above image was taken two days ago near Madrid, Spain. The foreground horizon silhouette includes some of the Seven Peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range. Just a few minutes after this picture was taken, the Moon set.
Monday, April 25, 2011 Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Coin dealer Don Kagin of Tiburon helped auction off this 8.2-pound gold nugget, found in Nevada County, for $460,000. Photo: Mike Kepka / The Chronicle
With a little luck and some mechanical help, a gold rush will explode next month in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Actually, it'll be a minirush - specifically for the 180-acre plot of land where the biggest Sierra gold nugget in existence was recently dug up.
Geologists are heading there on May 16 with ground-penetrating radar to assess how much more gold is lying around. By month's end, they expect to advise the owner to put the land up for sale for as much as $1.5 million. Maybe more.
"We'll just have to see what we can see," said geologist Fred Holabird, who helped auction the big nugget last month in Sacramento for $460,000.
Any hopes that another 8.2-pound whopper waits underground will probably be smashed flatter than a rattler's head under a shovel, everyone involved said. But that's just part of the picture.
"That big nugget was a 1-in-a-billion find, but the likelihood that there is more gold on that land is 100 percent," said Holabird, who has been a mining geologist for the federal government and Fortune 500 companies for 35 years. "Just how much I can't say just yet.
"But does it have a lot of potential? Yeah."
The owner of the land has kept his identity, and the specific location of his property, a tightly held secret, afraid of modern claim-jumpers.
For the purposes of selling, however, it's been revealed that the land is near the historic town of Washington (Nevada County) and it consists of mountainous spreads of pines with two streams cutting through it. There are no buildings.
"It's very rugged - absolutely knock-down, drag-out, drop-dead gorgeous backcountry," Holabird said. "If you bring your fishing pole, you're bound to catch some trout."
Getting to the gold, on the other hand, will require digging tools and stream pans. The current owner found his gigantic chunk last year, as well as two others weighing 4 and 10 ounces, with a metal detector and a pick.
Assayers have estimated that there may be as many as 4,000 ounces of gold underneath the plot's dirt. Based on prices logged Friday, $1,505 an ounce, that much gold would be worth about $6 million.
Holabird was skeptical that more in-depth studies would show that much gold existed on the land.
"We'll see about that," he said. "I'm going to do a full assessment before I put any numbers on anything."
Author and Western historian Robert Chand-ler noted that despite the glamorous tales of the Forty-Niners - who, coincidentally, did a lot of mining around the town of Washington - most gold-mining ventures go bust.
"Just because most mines never go anywhere doesn't mean there isn't gold up there," Chandler said. "Remember every spring, when new rains fill up the streambeds with new pieces, and people get up there in the hills and find them.
"With gold at a new high, I would think the owner would be very happy to sell right now," he said. "It's the perfect time."
Saturday, January 8, 2011 By MARTIN GRIFFITH, Associated Press
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Image: sacbee.com
Reno, Nev. (AP) - Some 150 years after the forty-niners rushed west in search of riches, a new gold discovery in the Sierra Nevada is stirring excitement.
A 100-ounce nugget, found by a man last year on his property near Nevada City, Calif., is expected to fetch between $225,000 and $400,000 when it goes up for auction March 15 in Sacramento, Calif.
Fred Holabird, a mining geologist whose Reno-based company is one of the country's largest sellers of Western Americana and is handling its sale, thinks it's the largest California gold nugget left in existence.
Virtually all of California's gold fields have been thoroughly combed by miners, he said, and other monster nuggets from the Golden State have been melted into ingots for money.
While bigger nuggets have surfaced in Australia in recent decades, no similar-sized placer nuggets from California have turned up in museums, he added.
The Smithsonian Institution's largest placer nugget from California weighs about 80 ounces.
"The chances of finding something like this anymore are beyond remote. It could be one in a trillion," Holabird said.
The man was using a metal detector in an unmined ancient stream bed near the old Mother Lode mining camp of Washington when he stumbled on the nugget in February 2010.
The Union of Grass Valley, Calif., has identified him as San Francisco businessman Jim Sanders.
The so-called Washington Nugget is thick and oblong, and resembles a "squished loaf of bread," Holabird said, adding it was found in the same area where hydraulic mining was invented in the 19th century.
A lack of records makes it difficult to determine how the nugget compares in size historically, said John Clinkenbeard, senior geologist with the California Geological Survey in Sacramento.
But he said he's unaware of any similar 100-ounce placer nugget being found in California in recent decades.
"I can't put a numerical value on how rare it is to find a nugget like this," Clinkenbeard said. "All I know is that large nuggets are very rare and your odds of finding one aren't very good."
The largest known nugget found in California weighed 54 pounds and was found in 1859 in Butte County, he added.
The California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa, Calif., displays the Fricot "Nugget," a rare 13.8-pound specimen of crystallized gold discovered in the American River in 1864.
But Clinkenbeard and Holabird said there's a difference between Mariposa's crystalline gold specimen and the placer nugget found last year.
True nuggets such as the latter are a product of erosion in a modern or ancient streambed, while the former consists of native gold in quartz that has not gone through the same erosional process.
While current gold prices would make the Washington Nugget worth roughly $130,000, Holabird expects a collector to pay well more because of its historical value. Gold closed at $1,368.90 an ounce Friday.
"It's worth more as a collectible," he said. "No one will be melting this thing. It's one of the most important California gold artifacts that exist."
