I'm a tad poorly today, so have been lying in bed reading up on some uni stuffs for things I have coming up. Among them was the wiki page for a certain solution that I don't care to handle anytime soon but probably will have to. Anyway, it has quite a cool story that goes with it.
quote:
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of the German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after the jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.[5][6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia
Isn't that just the coolest thing ever? Probably not, but it's close I'm sure.
Anyway Biggies, feed me with useless cool knowledge that I can bore people with next time I'm in the pub!