The Art of Making Impossibly Thin Gold Leaves from a Tiny Piece of Gold

Gold is so malleable that a single gram of it can be stretched into a strip nearly two miles long. A tiny little coin can be pressed into a 0.0001-millimeter-thin golden rectangular sheet the size of a tatami mat. So leave it to the talented artisans of Japan to transform a tiny bit of gold into shimmering gold leaf that's so thin, it's almost translucent.