The metalloid tellurium is a lot rarer in nature than the price suggests; comparable to gold but far cheaper due to lower demand. That disparity between rarity and cost however is slowly erasing as tellurium has found various uses in electronics.

This element is also quite brittle and its manufacture into the unyielding geometry of a cube has given our lab quite a few headaches. This, their fourth version, is far from perfect but is nearing the best that is possible without resorting to individually crafting each piece and making the whole thing inaccessible because of too high a cost. Note the rather crude level of polishing and imperfect edges. This isn't sloppiness on the part of the manufacturer but rather the result of flecks of material chipping away from the plane of grinding. Where normally grit passes over a surface and leaves behind a smooth surface in the case of Te it creates microscopic potholes because of its crystalline nature. Finally, tellurium is one of a handful of metals that is truly, absolutely gray.

The weight of each 10mm cube is 6.12±0.03g and just over 100 grams for the 25.4mm one.