On May 21, it was announced that liquid lithium-ion batteries, while widely used in mobile phones and electric vehicles, present significant safety concerns. To address these issues, researchers have been diligently working on developing safer all-solid-state batteries. These batteries employ solid electrolytes instead of liquid ones and are paired with lithium metal anodes, offering higher energy density. However, a major challenge lies in the susceptibility of solid electrolytes to sudden short-circuit failures. Recently, Researcher Wang Chunyang from the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, teamed up with an international group of experts. Utilizing in-situ transmission electron microscopy, they successfully revealed, at the nanoscale, the transition mechanism from soft to hard short-circuit in inorganic solid electrolytes, along with the underlying principles of lithium plating dynamics. The groundbreaking findings of this research were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on May 20.