Amazing that stem cells have been coaxed into becoming sperm. I´m not sure this is the end of the male human race; I mean, who´d replace all the light bulbs? And anyway, would women terminate male embryos?

Secondly, I hadn´t come across memristors before. So many good things here.

  1. They were a theoretical deduction in the 1970s. The traditional devices: resistors, capacitors and inductors (plus two definitional links (current is movement of charge, flux is movement of voltage) didn´t cover all the six possible cross linkages between charge, current, flux and voltage, so there had to be one more thing: the memristor.
  2. We hadn´t seen them because they only work on a far smaller scale than the big three: this suggests we can improve on transistor size, which has impacts on computing.
  3. The memristor has built in memory: the New Scientist analogy is of an elastic tube that remembers the last volume of liquid through it, keeping its diameter until a new flow begins, where it shrinks or grows as required.
  4. Memristive memory doesn´t require any energy dissipation: it stays written when it is switched off.
  5. The basic memristor might explain how a single-cell slime mould can apparently remember stimuli.

Now how is any of that dry, sterile and undwonderful?