Sometimes you just can’t help where you fall asleep – like at your desk for instance. One minute you’re watching cat videos on YouTube and the next minute, bam! Snoozefest. However, one should probably avoid dozing off in any of these places. It’s not that we don’t find motorcycles, shopping carts, and subway floors extremely comfortable, but napping there could give you a bigger problem than just a cramped neck. Check out some of the other bizarre places people have fallen asleep. You’ll never look at toilets the same way again.
Sand. Made up of 25 percent silicon, is, after oxygen, the second most abundant chemical element that’s in the earth’s crust. Sand, especially quartz, has high percentages of silicon in the form of silicon dioxide (SiO2) and is the base ingredient for semiconductor manufacturing.
After procuring raw sand and separating the silicon, the excess material is disposed of and the silicon is purified in multiple steps to finally reach semiconductor manufacturing quality which is called electronic grade silicon. The resulting purity is so great that electronic grade silicon may only have one alien atom for every one billion silicon atoms. After the purification process, the silicon enters the melting phase. In this picture you can see how one big crystal is grown from the purified silicon melt. The resulting mono-crystal is called an ingot.
A mono-crystal ingot is produced from electronic grade silicon. One ingot weighs approximately 100 kilograms (or 220 pounds) and has a silicon purity of 99.9999 percent.
Read more…