Way back in 1977, NASA launched its Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Both of them are now about 14 billion miles from Earth and, incredibly, both are still communicating scientific data back to NASA.

You go looking for gold and . . . you find some! Maybe you go to an antique store and find a piece of jewelry that looks like pure, shiny gold, but you find out later that it is only covered with a thin gold plating. Or you discover a gold nugget and find out that it is only a cheap collectible that has been created to look like the real thing, but isn’t.

What is an appliqué? It is a small decorative piece of silver or gold that is applied to another metal. The word appliqué is French, meaning “applied.” (An appliqué is also a piece of fabric that is sewn onto a garment as a decoration, but that is not the kind of appliqué we are writing about in today’s post.)

Gold is a yellow metal, right? So how does it get turned into white gold?

That is a common question about white gold. We’ll answer it in today’s post, along with some others.

Alchemists were medieval scientists who, legend says, were able to turn base metals into gold. Of course they couldn’t do that. Still, some of their discoveries are still being used today. One is aqua regia, a combination of nitric and hydrochloric acid that is still used today to dissolve gold and platinum.

What kind of precious metals do you own? Bullion bars or coins? A mixed collection of jewelry items you have picked up at tag sales and estate sales? A garage full of catalytic converters? A batch of old computers?

We recently found a bottle of “Platinum” skin cream on a shelf at a pharmacy store.

“Wow,” we thought, “they’re using platinum in skin cream?” But when we scanned a list of the ingredients that the cream contained, we learned that it did not contain platinum, only a bunch of chemicals, plant extracts, aromas, and coloring agents. But platinum? No.

It’s no secret that vast numbers of computers are being discarded. According to some estimates, one million pounds of old computers are tossed out every year.

“I’ve got a stack of old air conditioners,” a caller told us recently. “They contain precious metals that you can extract and recycle for me, right?”

If you want to spend a day hunting for precious metal discoveries, you could visit antique stores, dumpsters, your town dump, or an abandoned factory.

Let’s say that you have an old gold-plated set of silver tableware. As you know, the gold that the set contains is worth much more than the silver. Can’t you throw everything into a tub of some kind of chemical that will dissolve the silver and leave only the gold behind in solid form?

“Using other people’s money to get rich” is a pretty appealing idea, isn’t it? That explains why the concept is so widely promoted in those “make a fortune in real estate” courses you see advertised around the country. You know what they are - they are big courses that are held in meeting rooms at roadside hotels. It costs nothing to attend them, then they try to get you to sign up for much more expensive courses that teach you to invest in real estate.

You might have heard rumors that the U.S. Government operates a secret program to recycle precious metals. That rumor holds that the government, unknown to U.S. citizens, is processing vast quantities of gold, platinum and silver.

You have a pile of mixed metal scrap - shavings, powder, scrapings, what have you. You know that the batch probably contains quantities of platinum, gold, silver and maybe even platinum family metals like rhodium and osmium.  And you also have a strong suspicion that your pile of stuff contains small quantities of stainless steel, aluminum, copper and other low-value metallic scrap.

Many people like to invest in bullion and coins that are made of gold, platinum or silver. The predictability appeals to them. They buy a pure piece of platinum, gold or silver that comes in a hard plastic case that they can either open or put in a safe.

There are lots of reasons to worry that the trading price of gold could fall. We can start by mentioning the trade wars and tariffs that have been introduced by the current administration in Washington. We could also mention escalating tensions between the US and a number of other nations, including friendly old Canada, which could restrict the flow of gold across borders.

Platinum has many wonderful properties. It is bright, shiny and resistant to oxidation.

But did you also know that platinum combines with a number of other elements to form chemical mixtures that are useful as catalysts in chemical processes, and also in plating and other industrial processes? And did you also know that in many cases, the platinum that those compounds contain can be extracted by a precious metal refinery like Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners?

If you go shopping for platinum jewelry, you are going to find an awful lot of it. You’ll find it listed in online local ads and on online auction sites. You might even find platinum engagement rings listed in ads in local newspapers. And if you peruse the display cases at an antique store or mall, you might see that is labeled as platinum.

The trading price of platinum is not about to go down. One reason? With every new year, platinum is finding new applications in healthcare and medicine.

Let’s take a closer look.

Maybe It’s Time to Protect Yourself

Have you ever seen the silent movie “The Great Train Robbery” that was produced by Thomas A. Edison back in 1903? Even today, it is an exciting film to watch, showing thieves stopping a train and making off with bags of money and jewelry that they take from passengers.