The lithium-ion battery is, obviously, an extremely important technology. It helped make portable electronics possible, from laptops to smartphones to drones. It’s literally powering the transition to electric vehicles, and it’s increasingly finding a role in grid-scale energy storage, enabling more construction of intermittent renewables and helping with electric power decarbonization.But to get there, the lithium-ion battery took a long, winding road. It took decades of research, performed aro...