Midas Touch: Physicists have accidentally realized an age-old dream of medieval alchemy by turning lead into gold. While smashing lead atoms together at near-light speed to mimic the Big Bang, they noticed that the collisions were producing gold when atoms lost exactly three protons during near-misses. This isn’t really something you can start as your next side hustle though — each experiment only produces about 29 trillionths of a gram of gold that fragments in a fraction of a second.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/science/large-hadron-collider-lead-gold-b2749928.html