Nature.2021.06.12 [Sat, 12 Jun 2021]

[Sat, 12 Jun 2021] This Week News in Focus Books & Arts Opinion Work Research | Next section | Main menu | Donation | Next section | Main menu | | Next section | Main menu | Previous section | This Week Embrace the WHO’s new naming system for coronavirus variants [09 June 2021] 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 June 2021] Editorial • 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 [08 June 2021] World View • A cookie-cutter strategy to reform science will cause resentment, not improvement. A light touch changes the strength of a single atomic bond [07 June 2021] Research Highlight • A technique that uses an electric field to tighten the bond between two atoms can allow a game of atomic pick-up-sticks. How fit can you get? These blood proteins hold a clue [04 June 2021] Research Highlight • Scientists pinpoint almost 150 biomarkers linked to intrinsic cardiovascular fitness, and 100 linked to fitness gained from training. Complex, lab-made ‘cells’ react to change like the real thing [02 June 2021] Research Highlight • Synthetic structures that grow artificial ‘organelles’ could provide insights into the operation of living cells. Elephants’ trunks are mighty suction machines [01 June 2021] Research Highlight • 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 [04 June 2021] Research Highlight • Warming resulting from human activities accounts for a high percentage of heat-related deaths, especially in southern Asia and South America. Pyramid made of dirt is world’s oldest known war memorial [27 May 2021] Research Highlight • 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 meatloaf’ [02 June 2021] Research Highlight • The teeth of a marine mollusc hold the mineral santabarbaraite, which has been found in no other living thing. | Next section | Main menu | Previous section | | Next | Section menu | Main menu | EDITORIAL 09 June 2021 Embrace the WHO’s new naming system for coronavirus variants The World Health Organization’s system should have come earlier. Now, media and policymakers need to get behind it. Download PDF 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 that lead to increased infections locally — as well as the more dangerous ‘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 Jobs from Nature Careers All jobs Postdoctoral Fellow, Statistical Methodologies for Metabolomics Data Analysis The University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver, Canada JOB POST Postdoctoral Fellow in River Dynamics The University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver, Canada JOB POST PhD Student in Wnt signaling German Cancer Research Center in the Helmholtz Association (DKFZ) Heidelberg, Germany JOB POST Postdoc (all genders), Department Detector Laboratory (DTL) Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research GmbH (GSI) Darmstadt, Germany JOB POST Download PDF Related Articles SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Interest and Concern naming scheme conducive for global discourse Coronavirus variants get Greek names — but will scientists use them? The world needs a single naming system for coronavirus variants This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- 021-01508-8 | Section menu | Main menu | | Next | Section menu | Main menu | Previous | 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. Download PDF 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 — will help to make the industry more resilient. 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.

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