10 most expensive substances in the world

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Keep in mind that some of them are prohibited, others are useless, and others are even dangerous.

10. Horn of a rhinoceros

• Price: from $ 60 to $ 110 per gram.
• Where to find: in the countries of South-East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia and Malaysia). In nature, the substance is usually found attached to a rhinoceros. The animals themselves can be found in Africa and Asia.

In China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, the horn is believed to heal cancer, fever and other diseases, and also serves as an aphrodisiac. Therefore, African poachers regularly kill rhinos and trade their remains on the black market. According to rough estimates, since 2007, at least 7,100 of these animals have been killed in Africa, and there are about 25,000 of them. Recently, however, the demand for the product has decreased, because China has begun to fight this trade.

From a medical point of view, swallowing crushed horn is no more beneficial than biting nails. After all, rhino horns are composed of keratin. Their treatment of fever or cancer is superstition that is not confirmed by anything. So rhinos are dying completely in vain.

9. Rhodium

• Price: approximately $ 363 per gram.
• Where to find: in native platinum, mainly in South Africa, as well as in Canada, Colombia and Russia.

Rhodium is the most expensive and hardest of all precious metals. It costs more than gold and platinum, but outwardly looks like silver.

Rhodium is not used to create jewelry - it is too expensive. It is also very fragile. Instead, it is applied to the surface of jewelry to increase its durability. This is called rhodium plating.

Another element is used in the electronics and glass industry, to create neutron flux detectors in nuclear reactors and as a catalyst in the production of nitric acid.

8. LSD

• Price: about $ 3,000 per gram in its purest crystalline form.
• Where to find: it is better not to look for it.

LSD is d-lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychedelic that causes violent hallucinations in humans. It was discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann and immediately used - at first by accident, and then he got involved.

LSD is made from ergot, a fungus that causes ergotism, a disease that causes hallucinations, gangrene and convulsions. The creation of LSD is prohibited by law in most countries of the world, which is why the substance is so expensive.

7. Tritium

• Price: $ 30,000 per gram.
• Where to find: Tritium Extraction Facility, Savannah River, USA; PA "Mayak", Ozersk, Russia; Ontario Hydro, Darlington Nuclear Power Plant, Canada. In nature, it occurs in the upper layers of the atmosphere when cosmic radiation particles collide with the nuclei of nitrogen atoms.

The most abundant substance in the universe is hydrogen. That is why it is so cheap. It is all the more amusing that the radioactive isotope of hydrogen tritium, on the contrary, is quite expensive.

Tritium is produced in nuclear reactors by irradiating lithium-6 with neutrons. It costs about $ 30 million to create one kilogram of this substance.

Tritium is a transparent invisible gas. A story is connected with this, which is told by the employees of the High-tech Research Institute of Inorganic Materials. They say that once the officials came there with a check and demanded to show them the tritium. Scientists could not do this and received a scolding. But, in general, tritium in concentrated form glows, so it is added to key rings, watch hands and medical devices.

It is also used as fuel in thermonuclear reactors and charged with hydrogen bombs. And tritium is also fed to low-power generators, for example, in medical devices.

6. Painite

• Price: up to $ 300,000 per gram or up to $ 60,000 per carat.
• Where to find: natural deposits in Mogok and Kachin counties in Myanmar.

If you think that a girl's best friend is diamonds, then here's something more expensive for you than any diamond. This is painite - a mineral from the class of borates (Sasha Baron Cohen has nothing to do with it, the so-called salts of orthoboric acid), the rarest and most expensive in the world.

Until 2005, only 25 pieces of painite were known scattered in private collections and museums. Later, a deposit was discovered in Myanmar, which brought a few more crystals, albeit of worse quality. Painite color ranges from ruby red to brownish orange.

5. Zolgensma

• Price: about $ 390,000 per gram.
• Where to find: laboratory of the Novartis company, Basel, Switzerland.

Onsemnogen abeparvovec (commercial name - "Zolgensma") is the world's first drug for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy. It is an inherited condition that prevents people from moving, swallowing and holding their head. Although there is a type of SMA that manifests itself in adulthood, atrophy most often develops in the first 18 months of life. One of the most common causes of child mortality among those associated with heredity. The SMA gene is carried by one person in every 40-60 people on the planet.

For a long time, it was believed that SMA is, in principle, incurable, but in 2019 a cure was still found. True, it is extremely difficult to manufacture, so a 5.5 ml dose of Zolgensma costs $ 2.25 million. The drug got into the Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive drug in the world.

4. Regolith

• Price: $ 4.28 million per gram.
• Where to find: The moon, as well as any planets with a solid surface and asteroids.

Regolith is simply soil, loose rocks that cover the surface of celestial bodies. The closest source of regolith to us is the Moon.

Regolith consists of various minerals and igneous rocks, as well as glass that forms in places where meteorites fall when sand is exposed to high temperatures. According to Neil Armstrong, the first person on the Moon, if you place the regolith in the earth's atmosphere, it will smell like I. I. Cherkasov, V. V. Shvaryov. I burn the soil of the moon and shoot pistons.

In total, about 324 g of regolith are stored on Earth, collected by the Soviet automatic stations "Lunniks", 382 kg from six "Apollo" and 1,731 grams brought by Chinese stations. Some of the Apollo astronauts' instruments, smeared with moon dust, were auctioned off. In addition, at Sotheby's in 1993, they sold 0.6 grams of regolith delivered by the Luna-24 station for $ 442,500. An expensive but not particularly useful purchase.

3. California-252

• Price: up to $ 27 million per gram.
• Where to find: RIAR in Dimitrovgrad, Russia; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA.

Californium-252 is a radioactive chemical element that is extremely unstable and expensive to manufacture. It is a silvery white metal.

There are also rarer and more valuable elements, but this one stands out in that at least it has practical applications, unlike, for example, France. Californium is used as a neutron source in a nuclear reactor. It can also be used to treat some types of brain and cervical cancer. In addition, Californium is found in oil and coal detectors and some metal detectors.

2. Astatine

• Price: from 1 billion dollars Directory of Cyclotrons used for Radionuclide Production in Member States per gram.
• Where to find: in different countries of the world there are 36 cyclotrons capable of producing astatine. In addition, about 1 gram of astatine (approximately) is present in the earth's crust.

Astatine 1.

2. - the rarest element of the periodic system in the world. It is easier to create it artificially than to find it in nature. But even in a laboratory, no more than a few nanograms of astatine can be synthesized.

Strictly speaking, getting enough astatine to just see it doesn't work. Most likely, it would look like a blue-black metal that looks like iodine and silver at the same time. But it is not recommended to smear wounds with it because of the powerful alpha radiation that astatine produces.

In theory, astatine could help in the treatment of cancer. In practice, it is too difficult and expensive to produce. After all, it is not only extremely radioactive, but also unstable.

1. Antimatter

• Price: 62.5-100 trillion dollars per gram of antihydrogen.
• Where to find: CERN, Switzerland; DESY, Germany; Tevatron, USA.

Antimatter is a substance composed of antiparticles: particles similar to ordinary ones, of which everything in the Universe consists, but with opposite charges. In theory, when the Universe appeared in the Big Bang, quarks and antiquarks were formed in equal numbers, but now we can only observe galaxies and stars from normal matter, and not from any positrons. Why is a mystery, called in physics "Baryon asymmetry of the Universe".

Antimatter instantly annihilates upon contact with normal matter - the particle and the antiparticle cancel each other out, releasing a huge amount of energy. Therefore, it does not occur in nature. You can only get it in the laboratory. Physicists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) managed to create 309 antiprotons that lasted for 17 minutes. It is not yet possible to store antimatter for longer, it is very difficult to produce it, which is why it is so expensive.

In theory, antimatter can be used as a source of energy and fuel for spaceships. One spoon is enough to provide several megacities with electricity for decades.