Computers have always kept thinking and remembering in separate rooms. The processor works over here; the memory sits over there. Every time one needs to talk to the other, data travels back and forth across that gap, burning time and energy at a scale that has become one of the central bottlenecks of modern AI. A research team at DGIST in South Korea has built something that collapses that gap, and they did it using one of the smallest, most mobile elements in the periodic table. The device, developed by Senior Researcher Lee Hyun Jun and Associate Researcher Noh Hee Yeon from DGIST’s Division of Nanotechnology, is an artificial synapse that uses electrically controlled hydrogen movement to simultaneously perform computation and store results. The team describes it as the world’s first two-terminal AI semiconductor to achieve this using hydrogen as its active switching mechanism. The findings were published in ACS Nano. (a) Schematic of the proposed stacked structure of the memory device with hydrogen injection and control, (b) cross-sectional TEM image and EDS color mapping …