This is Nobel Prize material, right here.

Engineers find 'missing link' of electronics

Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements – resistors, capacitors and inductors.

But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit – voltage, current, charge and flux – behave in the three basic elements.

The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge.

"This was a stroke of absolute, sheer genius by Chua," says Williams. "He then worked through some complex mathematics and saw that such a device would have an unusual property: the ability to remember its past history."

Chua showed that his predicted device could remember the last voltage applied to it, and how long it had been applied. He dubbed the property "memristance" but the memristor was quietly forgotten because it was unclear how it could ever be built.

I really wish the Hard™ problems of mass & energy fell to cleverness like problems in electronics do.