2023年经济学人 谷歌发现数百万未知材料(1)

（单词翻译）

 

    Crystals can do all sorts of things, some more useful than others.

    晶体可以做各种各样的事情，有些种类比其他种类更有用。

    They can separate the gullible¹ from their money in New Age healing shops.

    在“新时代”水晶店里，它们可以轻松赚取容易上当的人的钱。

    But they can also serve as the light-harvesting layer in a solar panel, catalyse industrial reactions to make things like ammonia and nitric acid, and form the silicon² used in microchips.

    但它们也可以作为太阳能电池板的光收集层，催化工业反应以制造氨和硝酸等物质，并形成用于微芯片的硅。

    That diversity arises from the fact that “crystal” refers to a huge family of compounds, united only by having an atomic structure made of repeating units—the 3d equivalent of tessellating tiles.

    这种多样性源于这样一个事实，即“晶体”指的是一个庞大的化合物家族，只有由重复单元组成的原子结构才能将其结合起来——相当于镶嵌瓷砖的三维结构。

    Just how huge is highlighted by a paper published in Nature by Google DeepMind, an artificial-intelligence company.

    人工智能公司谷歌深度思维在《自然》杂志上发表的一篇论文强调了晶体的广泛种类。

    Scientists know of about 48,000 different crystals, each with a different chemical recipe.

    科学家们已知大约有48000种不同的晶体，每种晶体都有不同的化学配方。

    DeepMind has created a machine-learning tool called GNOME³ (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration) that can use existing libraries of chemical structures to predict new ones.

    深度思维创建了一个名为GNOME(图网络材料探索)的机器学习工具，可以使用现有的化学结构库来预测新的化学结构。

    It came up with 2.2m crystal structures, each new to science.

    它发现了220万个晶体结构，每一个都是科学上的新发现。

    To check the machine’s predictions, DeepMind collaborated⁴ on a second paper, also published in Nature, with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

    为了验证机器的预测，深度思维与加州大学伯克利分校的研究人员合作发表了第二篇论文，也发表在《自然》杂志上。

    They chose 58 of the predicted compounds and were able to synthesise 41 of them in a little over two weeks.

    他们选择了58种可预测的化合物，并在两周多一点的时间内合成了41种。

    The team at DeepMind say more than 700 other crystals have been produced by other groups since they began preparing their paper.

    深度思维的团队表示，自从他们开始准备论文以来，其他团队已经生产了700多种其他晶体。

    To help any other laboratories keen to investigate the computer’s bounty⁵, the firm has made public a subset of what they think should be the 381,000 most stable structures.

    为了帮助其他热衷于研究这部电脑资源的实验室，该公司公开了381,000个自认为最稳定结构的子集。

    Among them are many thousands of crystals with structures potentially amenable⁶ to superconductivity, in which electrical currents flow with zero resistance, and several hundred potential conductors of lithium ions that could find a use in batteries.

    其中包括数千种具有潜在超导结构的晶体，（其中电流能以零电阻流动），以及数百种可能用于电池的锂离子导体。

    In both cases DeepMind’s work has increased the total number of candidate materials known to researchers tens of times over.

    在这两种情况下，深度思维的成果使已知的候选材料总数增加了数十倍。