With the Olympic Games kicking off in Rio de Janeiro in 22 days, we ask you to ponder what seems to be a very silly and simple question: Are the Rio Olympic gold medals really made of gold? Well, the answer is “yes” and “no.” Have you ever wondered how the International Olympic Committee (IOC) could afford to give away pure gold …

A devious gopher, who’s a spitting image of Bill Murray’s nemesis in 1980’s Caddyshack, swipes an engagement ring that a golfer leaves unattended and dives underground to surprise his adorable red-bow-wearing girlfriend with a marriage proposal using the stolen solitaire. That crazy scenario is the theme of a TV commercial promoting Farmers Insurance, a company whose agents “know a thing or …

The 2016 American Eagle one-ounce platinum proof coin earned rock-star status recently when the U.S. Mint exhausted its entire mintage of 10,000 pieces within 56 minutes of the coins going on sale. On the Mint’s website, the coins were priced at $1,350 and purchases were limited to one per household. Despite that limitation, the website processed orders at a rate …

For years we’ve been writing about the incompatible relationship between engagement rings and large bodies of water. Despite the inherent risks of dropping the precious keepsakes in the drink, a cavalcade of can’t-take-a-hint suitors keep making the same mistakes. Which brings us to today’s story of Virginian Jesse Puryear, whose brilliant idea was to propose to his girlfriend, Alexandra Love, while …

Welcome to Music Friday when we bring great new songs with jewelry, gemstones or precious metals in the title or lyrics. Today’s installment features Demi Lovato performing “Stone Cold,” her rousing 2015 ballad about the pain of watching an ex-boyfriend moving on to a new relationship. “This song hurts so unbelievably bad. And when I perform it on a TV show, …

Executives from two of the world’s top-producing diamond mines revealed to Bloomberg.com how new scanning technology is helping to preserve the largest diamonds during the often-damaging extraction process. Throughout history, diamond-bearing rock was typically drilled, blasted, hauled and put through crushing machines to get to the gems that may be hiding within. During that process, extremely large diamonds, some weighing …

Precious opals are unusual because 3% to 30% of their content is made up of water. So, when planetary scientists discovered opal fragments embedded in a meteorite that crashed down in Antarctica, they wondered if Earth’s life-giving water was actually ferried here by asteroids and meteorites eons ago. Led by Professor Hilary Downes of Birkbeck College London, a team of …

Two former cheerleaders from the University of Kentucky’s national championship squad posed for an engagement photo so amazing that social media skeptics insisted that it must have been Photoshopped. In the shot that was taken moments after Adam Sunderhaus proposed to Ashley Vennetti on the beach in Turks and Caicos, the couple is seen in a gravity-defying cheerleading pose called a “cupie.” …

Welcome to Music Friday and the first day of July. With a nod to this month’s official birthstone, we present Jackson Browne’s “In the Shape of a Heart,” a 1986 ballad that uses a ruby necklace to convey the pain the artist feels when he learns his lover has gone. Rolling Stone called it “one of Browne’s finest love songs.” …

The highly touted Lesedi La Rona — the tennis ball-sized rough diamond weighing 1,109 carats — was expected to smash the world record for any gemstone sold at auction. Instead, it went unsold at Sotheby’s London yesterday when the bidding stalled at $61 million, short of the undisclosed reserve price. Experts had conservatively pegged the value of the gem-quality, Type …