"Now they have identified a potential storage device. The amoeba's interior contains a watery sol – a solid suspended in liquid – within a thick viscous gel. The sol flows through the gel like water through a sponge, creating a network of low-viscosity channels. Those channels are strengthened as long as the amoeba continues to respond to a static environment, but if that environment changes the channels gradually break down and a new network appears as the amoeba adapts. For a short while, though, the amoeba retains a “memory” of those earlier conditions."

"Di Ventra's team took advantage of the development this year of memristors – electrical resistors that retain a memory of earlier voltages or currents applied and vary their resistance accordingly – to design a simple circuit that models the amoeba's gel-sol system. Their circuit contained just four basic elements: a resistor, capacitor, inductor and memristor. By changing the external voltage in a regular way they could model the changing temperature conditions studied by Nakagaki's team. When they did this, they found that their circuit could “learn” and predict future voltage fluctuations."

Fascinating.