Protein nanowires that can learn as fast as the human brain

Neuromorphic computing, that is, emulating the neurological functions of the human brain through artificial intelligence, has been a new and largely unexplored area of medicine over the last few decades. Recent advances have used nanotechnology to create protein nanowires for greater electrical conductivity in biomedical applications. In a recent paper published in Nature Communications researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst; MA, USA) developed protein nanowires to use as electrical filaments in a memory transistor – ‘memristor’ – to carry signals between neurons in the brain. The remarkable thing about this technology is that the memristor runs on...