Alchemy and Aqua Regia

The chemical known as aqua regia, which the name literally means royal water in latin. It's a liquid with a reddish orange color that can not only cause severe burns if you touch it, it can literally dissolve otherwise non reactive metals like gold and platinum. Aqua regia briefly came up in our episode on heavy water, i think because we were talking about the historical anecdote where the chemist, george de hevishe had to a to quickly find a way to hide the nobel prize metals from being found out. And he ended up dissolving the metals in aqua Regia to prevent them from being discovered.