Could honey offer a solution to the global shortage of semiconductors - and thus help reduce electronic waste? A new US study suggests that honey could be used to make an eco-friendly computer chip that can process and store data by mimicking the human brain. Hailed by some as the future of computing, so-called neuromorphic systems are much faster and consume far less power than traditional computers. Engineers from Washington State University (WSU) have demonstrated that it is possible to make them more organic. They discovered that honey can be used to make a memristor – a transistor-like component that can not only process but also store data in memory. "It's a very small device with a simple structure, but it has very similar functionality to a human neuron," said Feng Zhao, associate professor at WSU's School of Engineering and Computer Science and corresponding author of the study. "This means that if we can integrate millions or billions of these honey mem