At the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, researchers have proposed a way to transform carbon dioxide—long treated as industrial waste—into a useful chemical building block, using a newly designed class of five-metal catalysts that work without demanding extra electrical energy. The work draws on two previously separate fields of materials science, merging ultra-thin boron-metal sheets with the chemical diversity of high-entropy alloys to create surfaces where different metals share the burden of coaxing a stubbornly stable molecule into reacting. Though still at the computational sta