Posts Tagged ‘crystals’
“What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear”*…
… or so it used to be. Scientists at Google DeepMind and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have applied AI to the task– with encouraging results…
Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.
… in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.
With GNoME, we’ve multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Of its 2.2 million predictions, 380,000 are the most stable, making them promising candidates for experimental synthesis. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles.
GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale. External researchers in labs around the world have independently created 736 of these new structures experimentally in concurrent work. In partnership with Google DeepMind, a team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has also published a second paper in Nature that shows how our AI predictions can be leveraged for autonomous material synthesis.
We’ve made GNoME’s predictions available to the research community. We will be contributing 380,000 materials that we predict to be stable to the Materials Project, which is now processing the compounds and adding them into its online database. We hope these resources will drive forward research into inorganic crystals, and unlock the promise of machine learning tools as guides for experimentation…
GNoME suggests that materials science may be the next frontier to be turbocharged by artificial intelligence (see this earlier example from biotech): “Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning.”
* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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As we drive discovery, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi, working inside an enormous tent on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field, achieved the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction… laying the foundation for the atomic bomb and later, nuclear power generation– that’s to say, inaugurating the Atomic Age.
“…the Italian Navigator has just landed in the New World…”
– Coded telephone message confirming first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, December 2, 1942.
Indeed, exactly 15 years later, on this date in 1957, the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, reached criticality; the first power was produced 16 days later, after engineers integrated the generator into the distribution grid of Duquesne Light Company.
“Matter is energy waiting to happen”*…
Chad Mirkin didn’t set out to discover a new property in matter. But when you’re inventing an alternative to atom-based chemistry, something strange is bound to happen…
While studying materials made from DNA-coated nanoparticles, researchers found a new form of matter– lattices in which smaller particles roam like electrons in metallic bonds: “Strange Metal-like Bonds Discovered in Customized Crystals.”
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
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As we muse on matter, we might send irradiated birthday greetings to Irène Joliot-Curie; she was born on this date in 1897. The daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, she shared a Nobel Prize with her husband for their joint discovery of artificial radioactivity (making the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date). Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also esteemed scientists.
Like her mother, Irène died of leukemia, likely resulting from radiation exposure during her research.
And they say that salt is bad for one’s heath…
In news likely to unsettle “young earthers”– the plurality of Americans who believe that the earth, and life on it, were created by God all at once about 10,000 years ago– scientists have discovered 34,000-year-old organisms…
It’s a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something … alive.
Thankfully this story doesn’t end with the destruction of the human race, but with a satisfied scientist finishing his Ph.D.
“It was actually a very big surprise to me,” said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.
Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.
“It’s permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules,” said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert’s advisor at the time…
The key to the microbes’ millennia-long survival may be their fellow captives — algae, of a group called Dunaliella.
“The most exciting part to me was when we were able to identify the Dunaliella cells in there,” Schubert said, “because there were hints that could be a food source.”
With the discovery of a potential energy source trapped alongside the bacteria, it has begun to emerge that, like an outlandish Dr. Seuss invention (hello, Who-ville), these tiny chambers could house entire, microscopic ecosystems…
The bacteria are the tiny, pin-prick-looking objects, dwarfed by the larger, spherical algal cells. The colored spots come from pigments the algae produce, carotenoids, still vibrant 30,000 years on.
Read the story in its entirety at OurAmazingPlanet.com; and read Shubert’s paper in the January 2011 issue of the journal of the Geological Society of America, GSA Today.
As we ponder the prospect of seasoning our popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1809 that the first U.S. geology book of importance was read by William MacLure, a Scot who’d immigrated to the U.S. ten years earlier, before the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, Pa. Observations on the Geology of the United States, which was published in revised form in 1817 and contained the first chart of United States territory that divided the land into rock types, was the first true geological map of any part of North America and one of the world’s earliest geological maps. (MacLure’s reading predated William Smith’s first geological map of England by six years.)
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