  Memristor technologies have been rapidly maturing for the past decade to
support the needs of emerging memory, artificial synapses, logic gates and
bio-signal processing applications. So far, however, most concepts are
developed by exploiting the tuneable resistive state of memristors with other
physical characteristics being ignored. Here, we report on the thermal
properties of metal-oxide memristors and demonstrate how these can be used to
emulate a fundamental function of biological neurons: homeostasis. We show that
thermal control mechanisms, frequently dismissed for their generally slow and
broad-brush granularity, may in fact be an appropriate approach to emulating
similarly slow and broad-brush biological mechanisms due to their extreme
simplicity of implementation. We further demonstrate that metal-oxide
memristors can be utilised as thermometers and exhibit a programmable
temperature sensitivity. This work paves the way towards future systems that
employ the rich physical properties of memristors, beyond their electrical
state-tuneability, to power a new generation of advanced electronic devices.
