well, that is exactly what raffaele and his team have discovered.o is pull all the bits of metal off of your phone or your computer, and you grind it up into this powder. this is a mix of all sorts of metals like copper and gold, palladium, platinum and stuff. so how do you get the gold out? well, the first thing you do is pour it into some pretty nasty acid. that's why i'm wearing the goggles and the gloves. it goes green because there's a lot of copper in there. but what you then do is pop this magic sponge in there. this sponge, over the course of 2a hours, attracts ions of gold more strongly than it attracts anything else that's in that solution. so about a day later, you have a sponge that's absolutely saturated with gold ions. what you do then is take the sponge out, incinerate it, and you're left with melted gold, which, when it solidifies, becomes gold nuggets. so the important question is, what is your magic sponge made of? the answer is ricotta cheese. ricotta cheese? no way. well, actually , yes, whey. because whey is the liquid left over