A Google AI has discovered 2.2m materials unknown to science

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.

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.