Muhammad Samizadeh Nikoo—an electrical engineering PhD student at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s POWERlab—recently discovered a brain-like learning ability in vanadium dioxide (VO2). When observing how long VO2 (an inorganic compound) takes to transition from one state to another, Nikoo found that it has “volatile memory.” To investigate, he administered electric currents through the material, noting how it changed phases while the current passed through …