Silicon Planet

From NHPR, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm your host, Nate Hedgie, here with producer extraordinaire Taylor Quimby. Alright, Nate, I want to play a little word association game, okay? Okay. I'm going to name an element from the periodic table, and I want you to blurt out, like, the first word that comes to mind. Ready? Yes. Oxygen. Air. Life. Carbon. Life again. Silicon. Bill Gates. Bill Gates. So you hear Silicon, and you're thinking Silicon Valley. Am I right, Nate? Yeah, exactly. Computers. I'm here in Silicon Valley this week. The Silicon Valley Index. The Silicon Valley guys do not, you know, a lot of time. Well, well, well, Nate Hedgie, you fell right into my trap. I did. So, yes, Silicon is rightly associated with the tech industry, because all the chips that power our phones and computers are indeed made of Silicon. Yes. But here is my beef. These other elements, they get major league science cred. You know, you, you heard oxygen and carbon, and you were thinking big thoughts, chemistry, you know, Earth, the universe. Life, the universe, and everything. Yeah. Silicon gets so tied to Silicon Valley, it's like a talented actor that got cashed. A actor that got cast in one big budget franchise and cannot escape the association. It's the Tom Holland of elements. Yeah. It would be like if your first thought when I mentioned oxygen was Oprah and the Oxygen Network. Exactly. And I am here to correct the record, because Silicon is just as cool and just as essential as those other things. From an HBR, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie here with producer Taylor Quimby. And if you could not already tell, we have got another edition of The Element of Surprise. This is our occasional series about the hidden stories behind the periodic tables, most unassuming atoms, isotopes, and molecules. And today we are telling you all about the sovereign of semiconductors, the headliner of the Hard Rock Cafe, technically a metalloid, but I think it's pretty metal, Silicon. Absolutely crucial to modern civilization. Plus Taylor gets a little bit into the yin and yang of chemistry. Why do we use it? Because it's a fuel. Why is it dangerous? Because it's a fuel. Stick around. Insurance isn't one size fits all. And shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed progressives name your price tool for years. With the name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the name your price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and Coverage Match Limited by State Law. A great story like Monsters Inc. stays with you forever. And Disney Plus is where you'll find your next great story. From the return of the award-winning hit series, Rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television. To the unmissable crime drama, High Potential. Gotta dead body, gotta go. A lifetime of great stories awaits. This spring on Disney Plus, 18 Plus. T's and C's apply. From an HPR, this is Outside In. I am Nate Hedgie here with producer slash middle school science teacher impersonator Taylor Quibby. I'm not wearing my elbow patch coat. Ooh, I like that. I know. I would love to have one of those. Okay. So one reason I think Silicon is so underrated, Nate, is that it is often sharing the molecular stage, so to speak. Yeah. And what I mean is that in the natural world, Silicon is not a solo act. In nature, you usually find it very tightly bonded to atoms of oxygen. But together, these two are pretty much the world's greatest rock supergroup. They have been topping the geologic charts for billions of years, and you've definitely heard of them. They're called Quartz. Quartz is Silicon? Silicon and Oxygen. Get it? Rock duo. That's cute. Taking the geologic charts. That's cute, Taylor. That's very cute. Yeah. So the chemical formula for Quartz is just SiO2, one atom of Silicon and two of Oxygen. And more than 10% of the entire Earth's crust is actually made out of Quartz. Were you into like semi-polished stones? Oh, yeah. I think every kid goes into like a little bit of a semi-polished stones phase. Jasper, Tiger's Eye, which I thought was super cool. Amethyst. These are all just different forms of Quartz. All just Silicon and Oxygen, with admittedly in some cases some other trace elements thrown in for flair. This was Silicon and Oxygen, so it's kind of like the Hall of Notes of the rock world. Some of your favorite songs, you don't really realize. Oh, Hall of Notes wrote that one. But Nate, there is one type of rock that has been so important in human history, and I had no idea it was just another form of Quartz. I'll give you a hint. Flint? Flint. So Flint, the veritable Swiss army knife of the Stone Age, is indeed also just Silicon and Oxygen. We have been using Flint to shape civilization as far back as 3 plus million years ago. We're talking Neolithic people crafting axes, cutting tools, bashing it against pyrite to make sparks and set fires. Right, absolutely. It allowed us to cook meat. Let's make our brains bigger. Thanks Silicon. And speaking of the Flintstones, do you remember what Fred Flintstone did for work? Um, no, I don't remember. Did he go to construction? Yes, yes, so he worked at... you're gonna love these puns by the way. Slate, rock and gravel company. His boss was Mr. Slate. Mr. Slate, I missed the Flintstone to say you. All of which is appropriate because what does Quartz in the crust break down into? What breaks down into gravel? And then sand. Even though it seems like the humblest, the most boring thing, the most irrelevant thing in the whole world, sand is actually absolutely crucial to modern civilization. It is the thing that our cities are made of, and I mean literally constructed out of. So this is Vince Beiser, he is author of The World in a Grain, The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. The most important thing that we use sand for is concrete, of course. I have to admit, I had never even thought about concrete before I started researching sand, but concrete is made out of something and that something turns out to be sand and gravel. So every apartment block, every office tower, every airport runway that you see is basically just a huge mass of sand and gravel that's been stuck together. It is not just concrete, bricks, mortar, ceramics. All of these things are made in part out of quartz based sand. asphalt, that black stuff that we drive on. Also sand and gravel, it's just been stuck together. Every window you have ever looked out of, also sand. Glass is literally just sand that's been melted down. That is so cool. Basically you can sit in a house built on a silicon based foundation, sipping from a silicon based mug and looking out a transparent silicon glass window at a silicon based road. We use more sand than any other commodity in the world except water. More than wheat, more than oil, more than rice, more than wood, you name it. We use about 50 billion tons of sand every single year. That's enough to cover the entire state of California. Like the world is silicon, essentially. Exactly. You know, we talk about Silicon Valley, it's like Silicon Planet. I want to pivot from sand and talk about quartz crystals. Okay. Are you a watch guy? I don't think I've seen you wear watches. I'm wearing like a GPS watch. A GPS watch? What's that? You don't know what a GPS watch is? Well, it's like a watch that has GPS. Yeah, you know, it's like a step tracker. Oh, a step tracker? Kind of, and it does other things. And it like your heartbeat and things like that. Where are you from like 1995 with these like Flintstone references? What? A GPS watch? Okay, okay. So maybe you've heard that like plain digital watches, you know, like so the Casio that we kind of grew up with. Those are sometimes called quartz watches. Yeah, they are. Right. Yeah, it's not a brand, which I thought when I was younger, it is a category of watch. And that is because inside every digital watch is a tiny quartz crystal that is what gives it its internal clock. Oh, that's so cool. So if you run an alternating current through a quartz crystal, it vibrates. And more importantly, engineers can shape that crystal so it vibrates at a very precise and measurable frequency. Exactly 32,768 times per second. And so watchmakers add a little component, it measures those vibrations. That is how it knows what a second is. That's how it measures time. Man, inventions are so cool. Just like what we humans have accomplished. It's pretty wild. So there is one of these quartz oscillators as they're called inside your smartphone in your Wi-Fi router in your GPS watch. Digital watches, by the way, when they were invented, tanked the famous Swiss watch industry, which had doubled down on the old school mechanical watches that relied on gears and whatnot. Do you know what they call this period in Switzerland? The dark age, the darkness. They call it the quartz crisis. The quartz crisis. Not big fans of quartz over there. So we've got quartz. We've got quartz sand. We have got quartz crystals. And to introduce you to the next thing, I want you to meet Megan Brewster. Silicon is such an amazing element and there's so much to talk about. She's a material scientist. She's vice president for advanced technology at Impinge, a company that makes those little RFID tags that are in lots of electronics. But I talked to her mainly because she, like me, is a silicon nerd. Silicon is the foundation of our modern world, but in a way that it's like the air we breathe, the ground we're walking on, you don't think about it, you take it for granted. Wait, I got to actually interrupt you. Did you say silicon? Well, some people say silicon, some people say silicon. Tomato, tomato. Got it. Yeah, tomato, tomato, silicon, silicon. So a tiny bit of chemistry here, Nate. When we're looking at this silicon and oxygen relationship, or really any simple molecule that is a core building block for bigger ones, we call that a monomer. A monomer is a single molecule. And then when you put a bunch of monomers together, you get a polymer, many monomers. And these polymers, these repeating chains of monomers, that could be something organic, like DNA. Or in the case of silicon and oxygen, SIO is your monomer, and you put a bunch of those together, SIO, SIO, SIO. And you synthesize something that is not found in the natural world at all, silicon. Which we think about as a kind of synthetic rubber, but is, depending on how you define it, a form of plastic, and a very useful one at that. Uh oh, the grandma's griddle melt those mitts. You need hot hands. The amazing new silicone gloves, toughen up to handle all the hot stuff. Remove the lid and watch. Hot hands handle scalding hot steam like a dream. Flip the bacon without the burn. Use the non-slip silicone grips for sizzling hot cat lean. Yeah, so silicone, which I don't know why they did this, but they just threw an E on the end of silicon, and now it's the name for the plastic silicone. It has a lot of great qualities. It is super heat resistant. Uh, which is why it's a good material for stuff like kitchen utensils, like spatulas and molds and oven mitts. Plus, it is inert, chemically speaking. It doesn't contain BPA. Right, yeah. That's why silicone ends up in things like baby products. So think about toys, pacifiers, pet products. And of course, silicone has surface properties that are like well suited for implants. Implants. And silicone isn't just used for breast reconstruction, but also testicular implants, facial implants, heart valves, all sorts of things. It has proved its worth as a very good, quote, biomaterial, which is the name for pretty much anything that we put in our bodies. And truly, the list continues. Contact lenses, mostly made of silicone. Catheters are made of silicone. The soft, sort of flexible surface of silicone can trick the body into thinking this is not a foreign substance. That's wild. And it's less toxic. It has fewer of those things that can leach out and mess up your endocrine system and what have you. So it is kind of like weirdly the safe plastic to put inside you. So the contact lenses I'm wearing right now are silicone. Without jumping into detail, I would say 90% chance yes. Crazy. I'm looking through the world through silicone. You know, I should clarify, like silicone, it's not that it can't ever cause health problems. Yeah. But I think what's interesting is that in medicine, you always have to consider the alternatives. So before silicone catheters, for example, we used things like rubber or latex. Yeah. And we consider that latex allergies are pretty common and we use about 100 million urinary catheters every year worldwide. Oh, that'd be a bad allergy to have. Yeah. Yeah. Silicone starts looking pretty good. So I started playing music again. I actually just played this folk festival recently. And now that I'm playing music, I need to look a lot sharper than my typical athleisure sweatpants working from home outfit. Right? So I picked up this blue chore coat from Quince that I absolutely adore. It's durable. It fits great. It looks cool and it costs less than $100. You see, everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen. So you're getting premium materials without the markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Get started with Quince.com slash outside in for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash outside in for free shipping and 365 day returns Quince.com slash outside in. I'm here to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Wait, wait, wait, don't skip this. Don't skip this. Don't skip this. This is not an ad. This is me, Nate. I'm here to tell you that it is yet again time to open up the outside inbox to listener questions. We have been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions. So please send us the weirdest wackiest questions about science and the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER. Or even better, send us a voice memo to outsideinradio at nhpr.org. Okay, back to the show. Hey, from NHPR. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie and I'm here with Taylor Quimby, who's been trying to convince me, successfully, I would say, that I have not been sufficiently grateful for the role Silicon plays in my life. And I can already say that absolutely I have not been sufficiently grateful. Alright, Nate, so it is time to talk about one of my favorite words. And that word is, metalloid. Sounds like a game that you would play at an arcade. Yeah, I thought it sounds like a villain of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yeah, totally. So, Silicon, when it's by itself and not attached to oxygen, is one of just a few elements that are classified as metalloids. Metaloids look kind of like metals. They've got that reflective silvery luster, but they are different in some key ways. So, metalloids are brittle. Unlike most metals, you cannot hammer them into different shapes. There are no metalloid blacksmiths. Here's another one. Metals are conductors, right? Metals such as aluminum or copper, they just naturally conduct electricity. You don't have to add any energy. Again, this is Megan Brewster, a material scientist who currently works for the RFID company Impinge. On the other side of the scale, you've got insulators like ceramics, so like your coffee mug. That's not going to conduct electricity even once you add massive amounts of energy. Metaloids are somewhere in the middle. Oh, are they semi-conductors? Exactly, you got it. Semiconductors are the goldilocks of materials. They conduct electricity with not too little, not too much energy, just the right amount of energy. And our ability to control that electrical conduction, that's the basis of computer chips. So cool. But, Nate, can I be honest with you? I don't think I have ever in my career written and rewritten a section as much as I have this next one. Okay. And that's because, you know, I think you can say like, oh, they're a semiconductor, but it is really hard to grok how you get from that idea to your smartphone. Yeah, exactly. But this is like the building block for the computer, for the smartphone, for the, etc., etc. Listen, I'm going to try my best. You're half right. Okay. You've heard of binary, right? Binary code. Yeah, 010101. That is the building block of our computing world. Correct. And we use the semiconductor property of silicon to make what is called a transistor. These are essentially on and off switches. And when we talk about ones and zeros, on electricity, that's a one. Off, no electricity, that's a zero. It's a zero. Okay. We have built more and more complicated codes that can do more complicated things. All of it from ones and zeros, and all of it comes down to a material that you can control the electricity to shut it on and off, on and off, on and off, over and over again, billions of times. That's computing. It's amazing. I'm like looking at you through a zoom screen and just thinking of all the ones and zeros that are going on and off in my computer just to show your face to me. I should say, Nate, there are other elements that are used to make microchips. Yeah, because I was going to say, aren't there like critical minerals and all this other kind of stuff too? Yeah, and these tend to get a lot of attention. But just like silicon is the foundation of concrete, it is also the foundation of how modern computers work today. Because silicon is so abundant in Earth's crust, we usually focus on the other elements because those are harder to find or they're harder to purify. They're harder to substitute. It's almost like the opposite of rare Earth minerals when we think about it. It's like the super abundant Earth mineral. That's exactly, yeah. The rare Earth elements are the ones that get a lot of attention and rightfully so. But they're like the spice to a dish. You might get excited about the spice, but the fact of the matter is the dish is carrying the weight of your caloric intake and your meal. It's the starch. It's the starch. Yeah. So I need this to say, I think silicon deserves a lot more credit for the role it plays in our lives. But I mentioned this earlier, the way we use silicon, or maybe I should say the amount we use is not without problems. Take sand. I mentioned earlier that more than 10% of the entire Earth's crust is made out of quartz. But if you go Googling around, you will frequently hear reports about how we are in the midst of a, quote, global sand shortage. It's not that we're actually that the planet is going to run out of sand anytime soon. Here's Vince Beiser again, the author of The World in a Grain with an explanation. There's lots of sand in the world. The problem is the damage that we're having to do to get that sand. Sand mining happens all over the world and in many different ways, right? It runs the gamut from literally, you know, in developing countries, you've got, you might be like half a dozen guys with shovels, you know, loading up bags, a bunch of bags being carried on the back of a donkey or a pickup truck, all the way to gigantic multinational corporations that have ships that are the size of 80 story apartment buildings, just vacuuming up sand from the bottom of the ocean. Sand does more harm than others. And depending on where it's happening and how well regulated it is and so on and so on, it can be worse. It can be better. But probably the, the most, one of the most common ways and the most damaging ways that we get sand is by dredging it up from river beds. It's really easy. Basically, you just take a big old ship, like a barge, put it out in the middle of a big, any big river, the Mississippi, the Yangtzee, the May Kong, whatever, drop a pipe from the, from that barge down to the bottom of that river and just, it's like a big straw. Just, I drink your milkshake. Just sucks that sand right up. I drink it up. The problem is anything that was living down on that river bed, any fish or, you know, shellfish, right, they're gone. They've just annihilated their habitat. Second is, by doing that, you've stirred up all the silt and muck and mud and whatever else was down at the river bottom, which can literally suffocate fish that live further up in the water. You know, that are swimming around in there, can literally choke them to death. Wow. And not surprisingly, you know, there's a very direct human cost to this kind of resource extraction too, right? Christ actually started this book because he'd heard this story about a guy in India who was literally murdered because he was trying to stop illegal sand mining in his community. You have organized crime. You've got gangs that are involved in illegally digging up sand in places where they're not supposed to, in places where they have no right to. And if you get in their way, they do what organized crime does everywhere. You know, they pay off bribes to officials to leave them alone. And if you try to stop them, they will beat you up. They will kidnap you. And if they have to, they'll kill you. You know, it's funny. You think of all these, you know, materials in our world that we think are rare or disappearing. Water, gold, oil, those kind of things. But you never really talk about sand. But you know, when you look at the amount of sand that's needed, particularly to develop the world at the speeds and scope that we do, you know, Vince will tell you like, there is no alternative material. There is no, there is nothing that you could be like, oh, well, we'll use this instead. Yeah. That doesn't have consequences. Really makes me want to make sure I recycle my glass. Yeah. Right? Yeah. You know, awareness has definitely grown, right? Even though most people still have never heard of it. You know, there's been a lot more reporting. There's a lot more academic research going on around it now. So the issue is getting more attention. I can't really say that there's been much improvement. To me, this tension between the benefits and costs of a particular material or element or how we use it. Yeah. I think it's interesting because it keeps coming up in these elements of surprise segments that we do. We are constantly weighing the benefit of all the things a particular material allows us to do with the cost of what it takes to get that thing. So my last story for this episode and my favorite example of this comes from another silicon-based mineral and it's a sort of famous one you have probably heard of. What is asbestos? Okay. It's a naturally occurring mineral. Asbestos. Oh, yes. It looks in its pure state, a very good vein of asbestos. You can see the fibers and it's white or off white. This by the way is Rachel Maines, a historian and author of Asbestos and Fire, Technological Trade Offs and the Body at Risk. And it admittedly has a few really useful properties. It is resistive to chemicals. It's resistive to heat and it's resistable to basically almost all forms of corrosion. It's electrically resistive. And maybe you've heard that asbestos is bad for you. It is. But back in the early and mid-20th century, a material that was resistant to both fire and electricity was in very high demand. Early on, they didn't understand how electricity worked and there were no such people as electricians. So they would just come in and string wire and the next thing you know, the house is on fire. You know, it was a mess. When I went to school, there were seven to ten school fires per day in the United States. So we started using asbestos in so many places. In many cases, local building codes would require fire safe materials and asbestos was one of the best we had. She's using kentile vinyl asbestos tile, easiest flooring to install. Asbestos was sometimes referred to as the miracle mineral. A family of minerals which can resist heat. It was in insulation. It was in wiring. With stand acids. It was in car breaks. Absorb sound. And household products like potholders and tablecloths. We used it for Christmas decorations. We even used it in Santa Beards. Oh. Santa Beards and whiskers used to be made of asbestos. Because Santa used to smoke. I mean putting it right on your face. Wow. But you can see if you're smoking something that could ignite your fake beard. You know, and you've got a child sitting in your lap and you're smoking and your beard catches fire. I mean, that's a bad scenario. I mean, like this is very dark. But you know, like there's just the double lung danger there of smoking and then also breathing in little pieces of asbestos. This cannot be good for you. Yeah. Now we know that asbestos causes a lung disease called asbestosis and a particular type of cancer called mesothelioma. But Rachel points out this really interesting thing, right? Which is that the reason they're dangerous. Is this very same reason that they are fire-resistive, chemical-resistive and electrically-resistive. Which is that basically nothing causes them to deteriorate. And when something that doesn't deteriorate gets in your lungs, that is really bad. Rachel put it this way. She compared it to gasoline. The same properties that make it dangerous also make it desirable to use. Why do we use it? Because it's a fuel. It's dangerous because it's a fuel. Look, Nate, I'm not trying to redeem asbestos or tell you you shouldn't worry about it, you know, if you move into an older house. But this point that Rachel just made, the dangers and the benefits of an element being so often two sides of the same coin, this is what I like to think of as the true yin and yang of chemistry. We have since found substitutes for almost everything that asbestos did. But some of them were extremely difficult. Automobile brakes, that was a very difficult substitution. It took more than 20 years to develop something that would stop a car as effectively as asbestos did. So, Nate, I'm glad I've gotten you to appreciate Silicon more than you did before this episode. I mean, you kind of had me at hello, you know, with this episode. You just threw in like the whole world's made of Silicon. I know, right. But if I'm really going to embody a true middle school science teacher, what I would say is, hopefully without dampening any of your newfound Silicon joy, the moral of this story is there is no good or bad element any more than there is such a thing as a miracle mineral. Yeah. You know the Silicon hot hands, though, pretty miraculous. Yeah, that's why they're as seen on TV. You know they're good. With its five finger non-slip grip, you can even reach into the pot and grab the red hot lobster. It's the Silicon glove you're going to love. I can even shred pulled pork without using a fork. Lifted 20 dollar turkey with hot hands. Time to barbecue. Alrighty, that is it for today. If you've got a suggestion for our next element of surprise, please send us an email to outsideinatnhbr.org. And don't forget, Outside In is a podcast. So if you want to hear about any of the other elements we have already covered, helium, aluminum, and lead, you can listen to those episodes now and subscribe wherever you get your pods. This episode was reported, produced, and mixed by Taylor Quimby on an audio platform that was powered by Silicon. It was edited by Marina Hanky and Rebecca Levoie. Our staff also includes Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Jessica Hunt. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions and Ryan James Carr. Taylor Quimby is our executive quartz oscillator. Rebecca Levoie is NHPR's director of podcast safe silicone. I am your carbon based host, Nate Hedgie. Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. And think about this. If you listen to this as a podcast, you'll think silicone. Speaking of my language. Music in the background. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask, even in 2026. Enter how to. The long standing advice show and ambi award nominated best personal growth podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host who me, Mike Peska, each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond with help from a world class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silences. You've got questions. We'll find the experts and the answers. You'll follow how to with Mike Peska wherever you get podcasts. Have you ever asked yourself, can the president really do that or wondered if there was too much money in political campaigns and check out the new season of you might be right hosted by us former Tennessee governors, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. We're back for a brand new season now and you might be right. Cements the idea that constructive disagreement can lead to real problem solve this season. We're going to dig into the role of the National Guard, AI regulation and a lot more new episodes drop every other week. Follow you might be right wherever you get your podcasts.