It isn’t alive, and has no structures even approaching the complexity of the brain, but a compound called vanadium dioxide is capable of ‘remembering’ previous external stimuli, researchers have found.
This is the first time this ability has been identified in a material; but it may not be the last. The discovery has some pretty intriguing implications for the development of electronic devices, in particular data processing and storage.
“Here we report electronically accessible long-lived structural states in vanadium dioxide that can provide a scheme for data storage and processing,” write a team of researchers led by electrical engineer Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in their paper.
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