Chemists in Nijmegen have developed a reservoir computing system that uses the formose reaction to perform complex calculations, Nature reports. ‘You can use the same experimental data multiple times to perform hundreds of computational tasks.’

‘Since the early days of the computing era, people have thought about using molecules instead of transistors in computers because, at that time, they were smaller’, says Wilhelm Huck, professor of physical organic chemistry at Radboud University (RU). ‘But today there are disadvantages: transistors are now smaller than molecules, and a computer based on molecules works much slower than one based on electrons.’

That’s why the idea of molecular computing has moved on to DNA, where you can do calculations with smart circuits in the base network. Some time ago, for example, researchers showed that a whole series of DNA reactions could be used to calculate the square root of a given number.