Around 1.5 million smartphones are sold worldwide every year and recent estimates suggest there are nearly as many smartphones in existence as there are people on the planet. Today's smartphones are much more powerful than the room-sized mainframe computers of the 80's. They have rapidly become an essential item - a pocket supercomputer - allowing you to talk to your friends, watch movies, take pictures, play games and do a host of other activities on the go.

Most smartphones carry around 80% of the naturally occurring elements on the periodic table, ranging lithium in the battery to gallium in the electronics or the rare earth elements praseodymium and europium in the touch screen. These elements may not be familiar to you, and there is a good reason for that: they tend to not be rather scarce in the Earth's crust because the geological processes that result in their enrichment are unusual and sometimes similarly strange.

In this activity we will show you how we can determine the chemical make-up of a mobile phone, we will help you visualise this composition and tell you about the geological processes that lead to the formation of deposits of the elements that are essential to make your smartphone.