This element has properties that are halfway between a metal and a ceramic. While a piece of high-purity silicon looks like a metal when you hold it in your hand it feels like no metal you're used to and, should you be so careless as to drop it, it might shatter into a million little pieces just like glass (which, by the way, is nothing more than oxidized silicon!)

Silicon of course is familiar to everyone. It is at the heart of all electronics. A slab of highly purified silicon has micro channels etched onto it to serve as racecourses for electrons. Because its electrical properties can be modified quickly and accurately the element has all the properties necessary to turn it into a processor.

Buried under layers of hi-tech doodads, and invisible by virtue of being transparent as glass, silicon is perhaps the material that is most familiar yet at the same time least recognized for so few know what it actually looks like. Here's a chance to own a little piece of this key element and, for once, allow it to come out of the shadows and take the center stage!

Each 10mm cube weighs 2.50±0.01g. The 25.4mm cube weighs 41 grams.