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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke's Third Law, coined by the late Sci-Fi master himself, Arthur C., captures perfectly the world we live in today - where the way we phone a friend, fire off a memo or a missile all owe to technologies whose inner-workings most of us understand no better than the ape-men in the opening scene of Clarke's classic, 2001, A Space Odyssey.

And for the vast majority of us who wouldn't know a line of software code from an Egyptian hieroglyph, we're quite comfortable living lives touched by magic. But our virtual world has real roots in a range of arcane minerals, metals and elements found on the Periodic Chart, and distributed unevenly under the Earth's...