Month: December 2023

Scaling deep learning for materials discovery

Amil Merchant, Simon Batzner, Samuel S. Schoenholz, Muratahan Aykol, Gowoon Cheon & Ekin Dogus Cubuk 
Nature (2023)

Novel functional materials enable fundamental breakthroughs across technological applications from clean energy to information processing1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. From microchips to batteries and photovoltaics, discovery of inorganic crystals has been bottlenecked by expensive trial-and-error approaches. Concurrently, deep-learning models for language, vision and biology have showcased emergent predictive capabilities with increasing data and computation12,13,14. Here we show that graph networks trained at scale can reach unprecedented levels of generalization, improving the efficiency of materials discovery by an order of magnitude. Building on 48,000 stable crystals identified in continuing studies15,16,17, improved efficiency enables the discovery of 2.2 million structures below the current convex hull, many of which escaped previous human chemical intuition. Our work represents an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity. Stable discoveries that are on the final convex hull will be made available to screen for technological applications, as we demonstrate for layered materials and solid-electrolyte candidates. Of the stable structures, 736 have already been independently experimentally realized. The scale and diversity of hundreds of millions of first-principles calculations also unlock modelling capabilities for downstream applications, leading in particular to highly accurate and robust learned interatomic potentials that can be used in condensed-phase molecular-dynamics simulations and high-fidelity zero-shot prediction of ionic conductivity.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com

Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis

compiled and edited by Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Timothy M. Waring and Vanessa P. Weinberger

PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B, BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
How did human societies evolve to become a major force of global change? What dynamics can lead societies on a trajectory of global sustainability? The astonishing growth in human population, economic activity, technological capacity and environmental impact – together known as the Anthropocene – has brought these questions to the fore. In this theme issue, we bring together the major elements of a theory of human evolution and sustainability on Earth. We show how diverse theories and approaches help to understand the past, present and future evolution of the Anthropocene, and discover new opportunities for moving towards sustainability. Collectively, the work provides the basis for an evolutionary synthesis of the human predicament on planet Earth.

Read the Special Issue at: royalsocietypublishing.org

The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies

The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies
Marten Scheffer, Egbert H. van Nes, Luke Kemp, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton,  and Chi Xu

PNAS 120 (48) e2218834120

Humans become increasingly fragile as they age. We show that something similar may happen to states, although for states, the risk of termination levels off as they grow older, allowing some to persist for millennia. Proximate causes of their demise such as conquest, coups, earthquakes, and droughts are easy to spot and have received significant attention. However, our results suggest that unraveling what shapes resilience to such events is equally important if we are to understand state longevity and collapse. Risk of termination rises over the first 200 y, inviting a search for mechanisms that can undermine resilience at this timescale.

Read the full article at: www.pnas.org

Motile Living Biobots Self‐Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells

Gizem Gumuskaya, Pranjal Srivastava, Ben G. Cooper, Hannah Lesser, Ben Semegran, Simon Garnier, Michael Levin

Advanced Science

Fundamental knowledge gaps exist about the plasticity of cells from adult soma and the potential diversity of body shape and behavior in living constructs derived from genetically wild-type cells. Here anthrobots are introduced, a spheroid-shaped multicellular biological robot (biobot) platform with diameters ranging from 30 to 500 microns and cilia-powered locomotive abilities. Each Anthrobot begins as a single cell, derived from the adult human lung, and self-constructs into a multicellular motile biobot after being cultured in extra cellular matrix for 2 weeks and transferred into a minimally viscous habitat. Anthrobots exhibit diverse behaviors with motility patterns ranging from tight loops to straight lines and speeds ranging from 5–50 microns s−1. The anatomical investigations reveal that this behavioral diversity is significantly correlated with their morphological diversity. Anthrobots can assume morphologies with fully polarized or wholly ciliated bodies and spherical or ellipsoidal shapes, each related to a distinct movement type. Anthrobots are found to be capable of traversing, and inducing rapid repair of scratches in, cultured human neural cell sheets in vitro. By controlling microenvironmental cues in bulk, novel structures, with new and unexpected behavior and biomedically-relevant capabilities, can be discovered in morphogenetic processes without direct genetic editing or manual sculpting.

Read the full article at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com

From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians

Jana Lasser, Segun T. Aroyehun, Fabio Carrella, Almog Simchon, David Garcia & Stephan Lewandowsky
Nature Human Behaviour (2023)

The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who ‘speak their mind’ are perceived by segments of the public as authentic and honest even if their statements are unsupported by evidence. By analysing communications by members of the US Congress on Twitter between 2011 and 2022, we show that politicians’ conception of honesty has undergone a distinct shift, with authentic belief speaking that may be decoupled from evidence becoming more prominent and more differentiated from explicitly evidence-based fact speaking. We show that for Republicans—but not Democrats—an increase in belief speaking of 10% is associated with a decrease of 12.8 points of quality (NewsGuard scoring system) in the sources shared in a tweet. In contrast, an increase in fact-speaking language is associated with an increase in quality of sources for both parties. Our study is observational and cannot support causal inferences. However, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the current dissemination of misinformation in political discourse is linked to an alternative understanding of truth and honesty that emphasizes invocation of subjective belief at the expense of reliance on evidence.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com