AMOEBAS are smarter than they look: their bodies can store rudimentary memories. Now a team of physicists has built a simple electronic circuit that behaves in a similar way.
When amoebas are exposed to temperatures fluctuating regularly between cold and warm, their metabolism learns to slow down in anticipation of cold snaps. The memory-resistor, or “memristor”, devised by Massimiliano Di Ventra and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, alters the current of a circuit depending on an applied voltage, and when the circuit switches regularly between two applied voltages, it learns to alter the current of the…
