Funk Babblings

In my electronics classes (and earlier), I learned all about resistors, capacitors, inductors, and their behavior under various circumstances. What I didn't realize was that a year before I was born, a Berkeley researcher surmised that there should be a fourth basic component, which he called a "memristor". This concept alone makes me want to go back and generate circuit simulation graphs of it with SPICE.

Now HP Labs has figured out how to make them out of titanium dioxide, and their first use will likely be to get flash memory with over six times the capacity of current flash (on the order of modern hard drives), but as fast as modern dynamic memory (the kind that goes away when you shut off the power).

Ars Technica has an accessible description with some more implications.