How will other materials hold up under the grinder? Launch the gallery here to find out.

In the early 1900s, the element radium was so popular, it became a marketing term. Luminous watch hands used radioactive radium, but Radium-brand butter, fortunately, did not. Today, titanium is the new radium. Everything from credit cards to crowbars is advertised as having the strength of titanium. How many products actually do?

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I think Apple sells fantastic objects that look like they came from the future. And apparently, in that future we all live in velvet rooms and have no fingers-there´s no other way to explain the ultra-shiny mirrored backside of my new iPod nano, which got scratched and grungy with fingerprints in exactly three seconds. So I gave it a nifty scuff shield and, while I was at it, my own logo, using a superthin layer of electroplated copper.

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