The Alchemy The mad geniuses over at CERN have accomplished what alchemists of yore never could: they turned lead into gold. Yes, seriously. As declared in a paper published last week in the Physical Review C journal, researchers working with the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) atom-annihilating Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accidentally transformed humble lead into fleeting specks of gold. The researchers are part of CERN's ALICE project, which, put very simply, involves scientists rocketing atomic particles at each other at incredibly high speeds — not quite the speed of light, but close — in an attempt to replicate […]