The job of a materials scientist—to warp matter into new and useful forms—has historically involved a ridiculous amount of guesswork. That’s because the quantum-mechanical equations that determine the properties of a material are so fiendishly difficult to compute. But the brute force of modern supercomputing is changing things. A scientist can now program a computer to screen tens of thousands of chemical compounds at a time, looking for those that have the properties she needs. This technique, called high-throughput computing, is revealing new chemical compounds never seen in nature. Here's a look.