A device that sees, remembers and learns — on 500 times less energy

Your brain recognises an apple instantly, from memory; a camera feeding a computer must grind through the picture pixel by pixel, spending energy at every step. Researchers at IIT Guwahati and IIT Kharagpur have built a small device that works more like the brain: a light-sensitive artificial synapse that sees, stores and processes in the same place. In laboratory tests, published in the journal Carbon, it used 500 times less energy than comparable conventional devices built from the same class of material — and it learns: a second flash of light drew a response 180% stronger than the first, the way a real synapse strengthens with use. Tested on simple vision tasks, it reached 90% accuracy recognising faces and 85% sorting traffic scenes. It is a component, not a computer — but the direction matters, because the world's data centres are thirsty, and brains run on about twenty watts.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation