
Why your next laptop battery might be sand
A boring, abundant material is quietly rewriting the economics of energy storage.
A rare look inside the most expensive building humanity has ever made.

Photograph: tek54
The cleanroom hums at a frequency you feel before you hear it. Inside, machines the price of a passenger jet etch features measured in atoms onto discs of polished silicon.
Getting here took two decades and the combined output of a continent of suppliers. Losing it would take an afternoon.