The first thing you notice about Gerbrand Ceder's materials science lab at MIT is that there are no crucibles, no furnaces, no crystal-growing instruments. Instead, you find a row of high-resolution computer displays with grad students and postdocs tweaking code and constructing colorful 3-D images. It's in this room, quiet except for the hum of fans cooling the computer power, where new high-tech ceramics and electronic materials that have never been seen or made before are being forged. They are taking form "in virtuo"-designed from scratch on the computer, distilled out of the basic laws of physics.

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