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- This
- W
- eek
Embrace the variants
- W
- H
- O’s new naming system for coronavirus
- une 2021]
- [
- 09
- J
- Editorial
- •
- The World Health Organization’s system should have come earlier. Now, media and
policymakers need to get behind it.
- Google’s AI approach to microchips is welcome
- —
- but
needs care
- [
- 09
- J
- une 2021]
- Editorial
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- Artificial intelligence can help the electronics industry to speed up chip design. But
the gains must be shared equitably.
The replication crisis won’t be solved with broad brushstrokes
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- 08
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- une 2021]
- World View
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- A cookie-cutter strategy to reform science will cause resentment, not
improvement.
A light touch changes the strength of a single atomic bond
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Research Highlight atoms can allow a game of atomic pick-up-sticks.
]
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- A technique that uses an electric field to tighten the bond between two
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- 04
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- une 2021]
Research Highlight cardiovascular fitness, and 100 linked to fitness gained from training.
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- Scientists pinpoint almost 150 biomarkers linked to intrinsic
Complex, lab-made thing
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- cells’ react to change like the real
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- 02
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- une 2021
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- Research Highlight
- Synthetic structures that grow artificial ‘organelles’ could provide
insights into the operation of living cells.
Elephants’ trunks are mighty suction machines
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- 2021
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- Research Highlight
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- The pachyderms can nab a treat lying nearly 5 centimetres away through
sheer sucking power.
More than one-third of heat deaths blamed on climate change
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- 04
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- une 2021]
- Research Highlight Warming resulting from human activities accounts for a high percentage
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of heat-related deaths, especially in southern Asia and South America.
Pyramid made of dirt is world’s oldest known war memorial
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- Research Highlight
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- Grave goods suggest that some of the people whose bones are buried in
the Syrian monument were charioteers.
- The surprise hidden in the teeth of the wandering
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meatloaf’
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Research Highlight The teeth of a marine mollusc hold the mineral santabarbaraite, which has been found in no other living thing.
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- une 2021]
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EDITORIAL 09 June 2021
Embrace the system for coronavirus variants
- W
- H
- O’s new naming
The World Health Organization’s system should have come earlier. Now, media and policymakers need to get behind it.
Coronavirus variants will now be named using Greek letters.Credit: Shutterstock
It has taken nearly six months, but the World Health Organization (WHO) last week announced the first iteration of its naming system for two kinds of coronavirus variant, to be used in public communications.
An expert committee advising the WHO recommended using the Greek
- alphabet to describe ‘variants of interest’
- —
- which are coronavirus strains
- as well as the more dangerous
- that lead to increased infections locally
‘variants of concern’.
—
The long-awaited system is intended for use by the media, policymakers and
- the public and is published in Nature Microbiology (F. Konings et al.
- —
Nature Microbiol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-021-00932-w; 2021). It
should have come earlier, because its absence has fuelled the practice of
- naming variants after the places in which they were discovered
- —
- such as
the ‘Kent variant’, which is otherwise known as B.1.1.7. Under the WHO’s new system, B.1.1.7 is also called Alpha. The B.1.617.2 lineage, first identified in India, is now called Delta. The new system is both a more user-friendly alternative and designed to reduce the geographical stigma and discrimination that can come from associating a virus with a place. It’s also important because, when countries are singled out by news organizations that have millions of readers and viewers, governments can become hesitant. They might delay collecting data on coronavirus strains, or announcing new variants, to avoid what they perceive as negative publicity or the risk of being blamed for creating a variant.
The new system does not change the alphanumeric nomenclature systems that researchers use. It also does not prevent the naming of a location where a virus variant has been identified, for example to indicate areas where variants are spreading. What it does do is provide an alternative to names that mean little to people outside research.
- Coronavirus variants get Greek names
- —
- but will scientists use them?
At Nature, we will for now be using both the Greek letters and the nomenclature used by researchers, depending on the context, and will continue to avoid labelling variants by their geographical origin.
Nature’s news team polled readers on whether they would use the new system. Most of the 1,362 respondents indicated that they would depending on the context. However, around 15% said they would continue
—to use geographical descriptors. And more than a week after the WHO’s announcement, some media organizations and prominent people are continuing to identify variants by geographical place names. That needs to end. The letters of the Greek alphabet are well known to international media and policymakers.
The WHO system’s authors will be aware that theirs is a temporary solution. The WHO has already used 10 of its 24 letters to describe 6 variants of interest and 4 variants of concern that have been identified since December 2020. This means that a new naming system might need to be found.
Developing a naming system that is clear, intelligible and can work across
- cultures and languages is a complex process
- —
- which is one reason it has
taken so long for the WHO’s advisers to come up with its present solution. The World Meteorological Organization faces an analogous problem. It has a rotating list of 21 names for storms, such as Dolly and Omar. It also has a reserve list of all 24 Greek letters that it uses when the names in its standard list run out. But in March, it announced that it is retiring the Greek letters from its reserve list and adopting a new system of A–Z names, including Aidan and Zoe. The reason, it says, is that Greek letters can cause confusion
- when translated into other languages, and that some letters
- —
- such as eta
- and theta sound alike and might be confused with each other.
- —
The WHO’s advisers need to keep working on the next iteration so that it is ready to be deployed when required, and they should consider alphabets from other languages. Their present solution, although not perfect, is a simple, straightforward alternative for variants that are otherwise being named after places. It will reduce the use of geographical origins as the default when referring to variants, and thus avoid an unintended stigma.
Nature 594, 149 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01508-8
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EDITORIAL 09 June 2021
Google’s AI approach to microchips
- is welcome but needs care
- —
Artificial intelligence can help the electronics industry to speed up chip design. But the gains must be shared equitably.
A clean room in a microchip fabrication plant in Singapore.Credit: Lauryn Ishak/Bloomberg/Getty
One of the many consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is a global shortage of the microchips that are essential to electronic devices. The factories that make these chips had to shut down for some of the pandemic, and are struggling to cope with an increase in demand. Some products could be delayed by months.
It’s too early to know how the shortage will affect the industry in the long term, but the pandemic has focused attention on some key research questions
- —
- including how to make the manufacturing process more resilient to
shocks and emergencies.
One well-known problem is that microchips are designed in just a handful of companies, including Samsung in South Korea and Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm in California. But not all these companies make the chips. Some do; others outsource the work to third parties. And around 80% of the chips are made in Asia (Nature Electron. 4, 317; 2021). The biggest manufacturer is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in Hsinchu, which is responsible for 28% of global capacity using current fabrication methods. Although this concentration has undoubtedly been of great benefit to the region, it has also contributed to the current restriction of supplies.
Signs of change are starting to emerge. China, the United States and some European countries are increasing investments in microchip research and development. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other big US technology corporations are doing the same, with investments estimated at hundreds of
- millions of dollars. Spreading capability through more companies
- —
- and to
more low- and middle-income countries more resilient.
- —
- will help to make the industry
Time-savers
Also of help is a report this week that researchers at Google have managed to greatly reduce the time needed to design microchips (A. Mirhoseini et al. Nature 594, 207–212; 2021). This is an important achievement and will be a huge help in speeding up the supply chain, but the technical expertise must be shared widely to make sure the ‘ecosystem’ of companies becomes genuinely global. And the industry must make sure that the time-saving techniques do not drive away people with the necessary core skills.
Read the paper: A graph placement methodology for fast chip design
Researchers and engineers continue to design and manufacture microchips with ever more processing power and complexity. In line with Moore’s law
- —
- the principle that the number of transistors per chip doubles roughly
every two years as transistors become smaller (G. E. Moore Electronics 38,
- 114–117; 1965) the number of transistors per microchip has increased
- —
from a few thousand in the early 1970s to tens of billions today.
Although fabrication of the chips is largely automated, the design still relies on manual processes. Engineers and designers use computer-aided design software, but it can still take them weeks or months to work out how to fit all the components into the available space. Google’s researchers have now shown that the process can be completed in less than a day by using artificial intelligence (AI).
Typically, the area of a microchip is of the order of tens to hundreds of millimetres square. That space needs to accommodate thousands of components, such as memory, logic and processing units, plus many kilometres of ultra-thin wire to connect these components together. One of the most challenging aspects of the design process is ‘chip floorplanning’. This involves working out where best to place these components, in the same way that an architect designs a building’s internal space such that it can accommodate all the required fixtures and fittings.
AI system outperforms humans in designing floorplans for microchips Google’s researchers used 10,000 chip floorplans to train their software. The
software then worked out how to generate floorplans that used no more space, wire and electric power than did those designed by engineers. Miniaturization and low power are particularly important for the chips used in smartphones.
The AI-generated chips took less than six hours to design, and the method has already been used to design Google’s tensor processing unit, or TPU, which is used mainly in the company’s cloud-based machine-learning applications. More teams need to test the design software to make sure it is robust and can accommodate other data sets and chip types. If more groups can recreate its success, that will cement its place in the chip-design toolbox.
- N
- ow concentrate
More-accessible and more-efficient microchips will power the development
- of autonomous vehicles, 5G communications and AI opportunities that
- —
should not be missed. But it’s important to consider the wider implications of using automated design technologies, particularly the need for people with relevant skills and expertise, and for upskilling those who currently do the process manually.
- Chip floorplanning
- —
- whether manual or automated
- —
- requires expertise in
computing, electronic engineering and device physics. These skills take time to learn and are sorely needed in an industry that makes many other products besides microchips. It’s crucial that the companies involved understand this, and take appropriate steps to meet their skills needs both locally and globally. Automation often fuels concerns about a reduction in jobs. In fact, maintaining momentum in the electronics industry will require people and companies with the foresight to create the next generation of microchips.
