Striking just the right balance between softness and sturdiness, balsa wood is a choice material for crafting anything from model airplanes to full-size wind turbine blades. Scientists in the United States and China have opened up a new realm of possibilities for balsa by hijacking its natural structure with chemical and physical treatments to transform it into a “wood carbon sponge” capable of enduring repeated compression and other extreme mechanical conditions. Their work appears March 1 in the journal Chem.