The foam is created by first heating milk proteins until they break down into nanometer-scale fibers. These are then mixed into a gold salt solution where the two materials fuse and crystalize into a gel-like fibrous mass. It is then delicately dried in an carbon dioxide bath. And while the resulting product looks like natural gold, this aerogel actually is hand malleable at room temperature.

Even cooler, the color of the resulting nugget can be easily manipulated by changing the gold's particle size. "The optical properties of gold depend strongly on the size and shape of the gold particles," the study's lead author Gustav Nyström, said in a statement. "Therefore we can even change the colour of the material. When we change the reaction conditions in order that the gold doesn't crystallise into microparticles but rather smaller nanoparticles, it results in a dark-red gold." The ETH team believes that this new material could find use in a wide variety of applications from jewelry and watch design to use in chemistry and optics.