Somewhere between the pencil and the battery lies a question humanity has long deferred: what do we do with the carbon we have already released? Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, and Estonia's National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics have now watched, for the first time, the molecular moment when waste carbon dioxide becomes solid graphite inside a bath of superheated molten salt — and in seeing it clearly, they have begun to understand how to guide it. The discovery does not yet remake the supply chain, but it redraws the boundary between what is