Crystal balls
水晶球
A Google AI has discovered 2.2m materials unknown to science
谷歌的人工智能发现了220万种科学界未知的材料
Zillions of possible crystals exist. AI can help catalogue them
有无数种可能的晶体存在。人工智能可以帮忙罗列和编目
- zillion 极大的数目、庞大的数量
CRYSTALS CAN do all sorts of things, some more useful than others. They can separate the gullible from their money in New Age healing shops. 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 silicon used in microchips. 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.
晶体有各种各样的用途，其中一些比另一些用处更大。摆在新时代疗愈店里的那些能让轻信的人乖乖掏出钞票。但它们也可以用作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，还可以制成用于微芯片的硅。用途如此多样是因为“晶体”指的是一个庞大的化合物家族，它们仅有的共同点是原子结构都由重复的单元组成——相当于三维的瓷砖拼接。
- gullible 轻信的、易受骗的、易上当的
- ammonia 氨；氨水
- nitric acid 硝酸
- diversity 多样性；多样化
Just how huge is highlighted by a paper published in Nature by Google DeepMind, an artificial-intelligence company. Scientists know of about 48,000 different crystals, each with a different chemical recipe. DeepMind has created a machine-learning tool called GNoME (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration) that can use existing libraries of chemical structures to predict new ones. It came up with 2.2m crystal structures, each new to science.
这个家族的成员数量之庞大，在谷歌的人工智能公司DeepMind于《自然》上发表的一篇论文中可见一斑。科学家们已知的晶体大约有48,000种，每种的化学成分都不相同。DeepMind开发了一个名为材料探索图谱网络（Graph Networks for Materials Exploration，以下简称GNoME）的机器学习工具，可以运用现有的化学结构库预测新的化学结构。它预测出了220万个晶体结构，每一个在科学上都是全新的。
- highlight 突出；强调
