This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, beach season is in full swing and no trip to the seaside is complete without the sand. But that is just the beginning of the wonders of sand. Sand is all around us and tall concrete skyscrapers, computer chips, and your smartphones. If you feel the earth move under your feet, it might be sand.

Did you know that not all sand is created equally? The highest quality sand, the kind used to make

computer chips, comes from a special mine in North Carolina. And our need for sand has created

sand cartels, black markets for the grain.

Sand thieves in Jamaica stole part of a beach right off the island.

My next guest says that sand is the most important solid substance on earth and is at the

core of our daily lives.

He's here to talk about these tiny grains.

Vince Beiser is a journalist,

an author of the book, The World in a Grain, the story of sand and how it transformed civilization and you can read an excerpt from this book on our website, Science Friday.com slash beach. Welcome to Science

Friday. Thanks. It's great to be here a fascinating book fast I

you know we we thought we know about sand but we didn't I mean we know about the sand on the

beach there's sand in sandbags and in deserts what is the definition of sand so the word

itself just means any little bits grains grains, of any hard substance.

It's anything, if you really want to get technical, since this is Science Friday, it's anything with a diameter of between 2 millimeters and 0.0625 millimeters.

So it means that sand can be, it can be crushed up shells, it can be crushed up volcanic rock,

it can be lots of things, but most sand in the world, and the sand that we use so much of

is mostly quartz sand, silicon dioxide.

So it's not like the white clips of Dover, they're not made from the quartz sand, right?

I don't think so.

I'm not an expert on those, but they sure don't look like it.

So not all sand is equal.

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