Insects stockpile precious metal while gathering nest material, study says.Want to know if you're literally sitting on a gold mine? Get some termites, a new study suggests. New experiments in West Australia reveal that termites "mine" and stockpile the precious metal while they're collecting subterranean material for their nests. For the study, entomologist Aaron Stewart, with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and colleagues took samples from several termite nests and compared the nest material to nearby soil samples from varying depths. By using a mass spectrometer—an instrument that measures molecules' chemical makeup—they discovered that the termite nests were...