Across the long arc of industrial civilization, the question of what to do with things that wear out has rarely been answered well — but a team of researchers may have found a more elegant answer for one of modernity's most ubiquitous objects. They have developed a method to reverse the molecular degradation inside spent lithium batteries, restoring them to 95 percent of their original capacity and offering a path away from the linear logic of make, use, and discard. The discovery arrives at a moment when billions of batteries power the devices of daily life, and when the environmental costs o