A great deal is made of how many great scientific discoveries are made by accident for everything from penicillin to Post-its®. With no fewer than ten authors for the Nature letter “Production of phosphorene nanoribbons,” their discovery hardly seems “accidental.” The letter, authored by Mitchell C. Watts, Loren Picco, Freddie S. Russell-Pavier, Patrick L. Cullen, Thomas S. Miller, Szymon P. Bartuś, Oliver D. Payton, Neal T. Skipper, Vasiliki Tileli and Christopher A. Howard, explains their happy “accident.” A Happy Accident “Nanoribbons, meanwhile, combine the flexibility and unidirectional properties of one-dimensional nanomaterials, the high surface area of 2D nanomaterials and the electron-confinement and edge effects of both. The structures of nanoribbons can thus lead to exceptional control over electronic band structure, the emergence of novel phenomena and unique architectures for applications.” The discoverers of phosphorene nanoribbons were trying to separate layers of phosphorus crystals into two-dimensional sheets, but they ended up with “tiny, tagliatelle-like ribbons one single atom thick and only 100 atoms of so across, but up to 100,000 …