The Independent reports:

Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold – Physicists have made an unexpected breakthrough

The headline is actually inaccurate, the development is neither a "breakthrough" nor entirely unexpected. Scientists in America turned bismuth into gold back in the 1980s. Rumoured reports of nuclear reactors changing lead into gold go back to at least the 1970s, when Soviet scientists found some lead shielding on a nuclear reactor had turned into gold.

The science is relatively simple as nuclear physics goes, a lead atom differs from a gold atom by 3 protons. If you can remove these protons from lead, you get gold. That is apparently what happened during an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider:

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold.

The process of "removing" those protons is neither easy nor energy efficient, but it is fascinating. And the story spurred a somewhat interesting chat on X after I mentioned the story.

One reply doubted it was true, arguing it was a psy-op to devalue gold. When I countered these reports are not new and go back to the 70s, he re-countered with the point that is when we left the gold standard. It's a potentially interesting tangent, although one that doesn't personally sit right with me, since nobody has ever suggested this is a practical way to manufacture gold en masse.

What I personally find interesting – removed from modern politics – is that this actually proves alchemy correct and nobody has really engaged with that.

The Independent article even demonstrates a bizarre doublethink about it…

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?