Newly appointed National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Senior Research Fellow Matt Beard has 4-year-old squiggles on his office whiteboard. It’s not that the chemist is sloppy. He’s just mildly irritated. He and his NREL team had embarked on a complicated synthesis of 5-nanometer-diameter lead sulfide nanostructures. They were trying to create a nanoplatelet of the material. Instead, they made something different – probably because of impurity in one of the reagents, the mixtures used in c...