For decades, the promise of carbon nanotubes has been shadowed by the wastefulness of the very processes meant to harness them — building a film only to destroy most of it. A collaborative team from Skoltech, ITMO University, and Harbin Institute of Technology has now reoriented that logic entirely, developing a stencil-based method that places nanotubes precisely where they are needed and nowhere else, wasting nothing and reusing the template each time. Published in Light: Advanced Manufacturing, the work is less a technical refinement than a philosophical shift — from subtraction to intentio