Stanford has created a water-droplet computer

After more than a decade of research, scientists at Stanford University have created a working computer based on the physical movement of water droplets. It’s a breakthrough in physical computing that gets at the most basic definition of a computer: any programmable device that can carry about logical (mathematical) operations. By combining cutting-edge theory in fluid dynamics with very-much-not-cutting-edge theory in computing, the team was able to create a synchronous computer based entirely on the physics of water. As you might imagine, a computer based on the physical movement of water is much, much slower than a conventional computer based on the movement of electrons — but that’s beside the point. Nobody expects a new, super-fast liquid CPU, but by applying the principles of computing to the manipulation of matter, lead researcher Manu Prakash and his graduate students hope they can computationally revolutionize other areas of science.