Across the long human effort to draw useful energy from the living world, each generation has sought gentler methods — less fire, less poison, less waste. A new scientific review proposes that mechanical energy, already humming through countless industrial environments, might be recruited to break down biomass into fuels and chemicals through a process called piezocatalysis, where physical stress becomes electrical charge and electrical charge becomes chemical transformation. Researchers at Southeast University and their collaborators have mapped both the genuine promise of this approach and t