Fellow Science Lovers,
Game update: Nothing on this front yet. My face is still wedged into Scribes Emerge edits.
Let’s get Geological
Mallory gently rapped me over the skull to ask why I hadn’t written a geology article in a while. I had no good answer, so here we are. Talking about rocks again.
Or are we? Well, kinda. This time, we’ll see them on a small scale. Sand, soil, and dirt all seem interchangeable, but they have distinct meanings that matter to our daily lives. (Even when you’re not a toddler shoveling sections of the backyard into your mouth.)
Sand – very small rocks. Loose grains of stone and minerals that are smaller than gravel and bigger than silt. Usually between 75 micrometers and 4.75 mm. Or is it between 0.06mm and 2.1mm? My web resources disagree. Those ranges are quite different, so I want these internet people to make up their minds. Maybe I’ll appoint a sand king to rule authoritatively on this matter. Plants generally don’t grow in sand.
Dirt – loose rock particles that lack organic matter. Usually a mix of 3 particle types: clay, sand, and silt. Yes, sand is just one part of dirt.
Soil – a mix of dirt, organic matter, water, air, and microbes. Supports plantlife.
So the next time someone calls you a dirtbag, ask to be upgraded to a soilbag. Better quality of life. 
Why do these distinctions matter? Because the special properties of these affect how we can use them. As astronaut Mark Watney pointed out in The Martian, soil without microbes isn’t much use for growing crops. (He found an interesting way to add those microbes, by the way.)
Of the three, sand seems the most interesting to me. Let’s look at some of its common uses we may not be aware of.
Sand in my Pocket
The phone or laptop you’re reading this on uses integrated circuits built on silicon wafers. Those wafers are made of sand. Silica sand, to be specific. The sand we quarry for these wafers need to be composed of at least 95% quartz. (Quartz is silicon dioxide.)
But even this kind of sand isn’t pure enough. We have to heat and chemically treat it in a container filled with argon gas to remove impurities and crystallize it. The resulting rod of silicon can only have 1 impurity for every 10 million silicon atoms! This is spun in a crucible and creates a single crystal that weighs around 200kg (440lbs). Incidentally, I’ve been deadlifting around that weight these last few weeks, so I imagine that I’m lifting one of these. 
-a silicon monocrystal, Massimiliano Lincetto, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This crystal is sliced into thin wafers and polished several times to remove the jagged edges of the cuts. These wafers must have a surface roughness of < 0.1 nanometers! Only then are the wafers ready to get circuits etched into them. And that’s where things get really complicated. Photolithography is a big topic worthy of its own article. Remember all this complexity the next time you pay fork out for a new phone.
Sand in my Wine
Diatoms are a type of zooplankton–a microscopic algae that lives in water. When diatoms die, they leave behind tiny skeletons made of silica. (What on earth does this have to do with wine? I’m getting there.) These skeletons are a type of sand–they are particles of rocky minerals. And diatomaceous earth is a sedimentary rock made of this.
Food grade diatomaceous earth is used to filter beer and wine. Trace amounts of this end up in the beverages, but this is considered safe. Food grade means that the diatomaceous earth has <1% crystalline silica content and very low levels of contaminants.
Sand in my Gut
Clay is very small sand–usually less than 0.002 mm in diameter. It retains water because of its structure, so it’s usually soft and wet. With that in mind, why would we put this stuff in our mouths? (I’m talking about adults, not kids. It’s obvious why kids would eat it 
)
Because medicine! Some clay minerals like smectites and kaolinite are used in drugs to help prolong the release of antibiotics, hormones, and heart medication. Clay coats the digestive tract to make it absorb the drug over a longer period.
Clay is also used in drugs as lubricants, desiccants, disintegrants, diluents, binders, pigments and opacifiers. Because that was clear as clay, let’s look at each function:
-lubricant: keeps ingredients from clumping and sticking to the machines that create tablets and capsules
-dessicant: keeps the ingredients dry
-disintegrant: helps the tablet break apart and dissolve in the digestive tract
-diluent: dilutes ingredients to make them flow more easily
-binder: holds ingredients together in tablet form with enough mechanical strength and gives volume to low active dose tablets.
-pigment: gives color to the pill
-opacifier: protects the pill from light damage
I could keep going, because sand does so much more for us than get into our swimming trunks at the beach. Maybe I’ll devote another article to its other surprising applications. In the Scribeverse, especially in the upcoming book, we see a special use in some of the creatures: the drammadon and their drivers. I don’t want to spoil the books for you here. If you read Scribes’ Descent and Scribes Aflame, you’ll see what I mean.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few hundred critique comments to make edits for in Scribes Emerge…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon
https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/medicinal-uses-of-soi…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excipient
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137863/
Writing update: I just finished the last major revision of Scribes Emerge. Each chapter is posted on Scribophile where my critique partners are ferreting out every last weakness–real and perceived. I hope to finish this next pass to fix those issues by early March so I can send my beta readers a super clean copy.
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