[HN Gopher] Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for hi...
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Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency
bioelectronics
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 98 points
Date : 2025-10-31 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.plos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.plos.org)
| gnabgib wrote:
| OSU.Edu - original research (6 points)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698732
|
| PLOS - original paper (3+6 points)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45714547
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731592
|
| Toms Hardware coverage
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718691
|
| SemiEngineering coverage (3 points)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45730587
|
| Phys.Org coverage (2 points)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732287
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > We demonstrate fungal computing via mycelial networks
| interfaced with electrodes, showing that fungal memristors can be
| grown, trained, and preserved through dehydration, retaining
| functionality at frequencies up to 5.85 kHz, with an accuracy of
| 90 +- 1%. Notably, shiitake has exhibited radiation resistance,
| suggesting its viability for aerospace applications
|
| Soon we'll have shiitake replacing transistors in our airplane
| and spacecraft computers, while sitting and eating ramen on the
| vehicles themselves. The future is shaping up to be interesting.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What it makes me think of is 'cybernetics' research from the
| 1960s when it was not a foregone conclusion that transistors,
| especially CMOS transistors, were the future of computing. Back
| then there was a lot of research into alternate models of
| computation, something that's only becoming relevant today as
| CMOS may be running out of steam.
| hencq wrote:
| I recently read The Unaccountability Machine (which I can
| recommend btw), which mentions Stafford Beer's experiments
| with a computing pond. Who knows, maybe we'll control our
| factories with mushroom brains soon!
| physarum_salad wrote:
| How is this related to that at all? The fungi they used are
| clearly dead...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Having only dabbled the slightest in hardware... are functional
| frequencies topping out at 6 kHz useful for memristors in
| modern computing? I feel like having separate components each
| magnitudes faster would be better than combining them into a
| memristor that sounds so slow.
| xeonmc wrote:
| If it enables massively concurrent in-memory compute then the
| frequency disadvantage could just be scaled away.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Might be enough for microcontrollers and overall simple
| control applications?
| reactordev wrote:
| So sci-fi isn't far off after all.
|
| War of the Worlds.
|
| The last of us.
|
| Battlestar Galatica.
|
| All had some fungi/organic hook (ok, last of us is about
| zombies but still).
|
| Curious if we could mux them into something faster at a higher
| order or something. The idea that organics can be used for
| electronics is so wild.
| gertlex wrote:
| Planet/mindworms in Alpha Centauri :D
| foobarian wrote:
| Juffo-Wup fills in my fibers and I grow turgid. Violent
| action ensues.
| Razengan wrote:
| They are Non, they cannot understand.
| tosapple wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II
|
| Downloadable as 'uqm' in debian
| Razengan wrote:
| ....I..literally quoted another one of the Mycon's lines
| sholladay wrote:
| Star Trek has a number of organic computing examples, too.
| Species 8472, Data, and the Borg all use varying degrees of
| organic components.
|
| There's also the bio-neural gel packs on Voyager and the
| unnamed 31st century Earth vessel discovered by Archer and
| the NX-01 Enterprise.
|
| New Trek even has a mycelial network in space.
| Onavo wrote:
| As the young people say, Paul Stamets wants to "know your
| location".
|
| Maybe we will figure out mushroom powered warp drive too some
| day.
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| > Soon we'll have shiitake replacing transistors in our
| airplane and spacecraft computers, while sitting and eating
| ramen on the vehicles themselves. The future is shaping up to
| be interesting.
|
| By the way, some people say eating meat is not going to be
| sustainable as more and more people become able to afford it,
| and fungi are a great option for providing the equivalent
| protein intake.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| It's already not sustainable, but that hasn't really stopped
| us.
| bozhark wrote:
| It absolutely is possible though.
|
| We don't incentivize properly
| louthy wrote:
| The memristor industry will mushroom
| physarum_salad wrote:
| Preserved through dehydration? This means the fungus is dead.
| calibas wrote:
| There's a theory that's been going around for a while that trees
| were using mycelium networks to communicate via electrical
| signals. Some of these theories even went so far as to claim
| whole forests function similar to a brain.
|
| It's controversial, but considering this study I think we should
| take these ideas a little more seriously.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I thought this was fairly well proven at this point. If one
| tree is distressed, nearby trees become aware of it through
| signal passing using mycellium (which has more nodes in a
| forest than the human brain has neurons).
|
| Fungi are deeply alien life. Also, there is proof that there
| used to be towering mushroom forests in the time of dinosaurs.
| And if you pick up a boring brown mushroom in the forest there
| is a reasonable chance it is an unidentified species, since
| there are several that are indisiguishable except by full
| analysis (which there is little focus on).
| calibas wrote:
| I've talked to biologists who think the idea is just new-age
| hippy nonsense.
|
| It's not quite mainstream, Wikipedia goes over the current
| science fairly well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Terence McKenna could say 'told you so'.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Fungi are deeply alien life.
|
| Weird perspective, they were here long before us, and are
| even some of the earliest forms of complex life on the planet
| :)
| Insanity wrote:
| Lol, I asked ChatGPT to identify the towering mushroom you
| mentioned.. and it made a sexual innuendo joke instead..
|
| The response:
|
| ===
|
| Summary answer
|
| * The fossil in question: Prototaxites.
|
| * Evidence: large fossil trunks, isotope analysis showing
| non-plant behaviour; tube/hyphal internal structure.
|
| * Time & environment: Early land colonisation era (pre-trees,
| pre-dinosaurs) in the Silurian/Devonian.
|
| * The claim of "towering mushroom forests in the time of
| dinosaurs" is not strictly correct: they were huge, fungus-
| like (or fungus affiliated) but lived well before dinosaurs,
| and "forest" may be figurative rather than well established.
|
| If you like, I can dig up a short list of the recent papers
| (with Figures) on Prototaxites so you can see the fossil
| evidence directly. Would that be helpful, Rob Mpucee?
|
| ===
|
| That's a wild answer lol. Although it technically did answer
| the question.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Was it Snow Crash or Diamond Age (or something earlier?) that had
| mushrooms as the basis for advanced technology? I'm curious if
| there was actual insight there or a happy coincidence.
| deelowe wrote:
| I don't recall this in snow crash
| BirAdam wrote:
| It wasn't quite fungal, but Diamond Age had the Seed. The Seed
| grew any material/structure/device desired as opposed to the
| Matter Compilers and the Feed. We know that the Seed required
| tons of computing power to design and create, but the exact
| method of function of the Seed wasn't detailed. We do, however,
| know that it may have been nanotechnological as Nell had
| nanotechnology that her Mouse Army created to counter the
| nanites in the Drummers.
| brownsound202 wrote:
| The Stone Sky series by NK Jemisin referenced the use of
| genetically modified fungi as self-assembling construction
| material. Really cool to see how pervasive mushrooms are in
| sci-fi and how there's lots more potential to unlock.
| joelthelion wrote:
| Do we really believe that this kind of stuff has any chance of
| scaling and becoming generally useful?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Do we have to believe this will scale and be "generally useful"
| (whatever that means) in order for it to be interesting enough
| to talk, discuss and think about?
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| To be fair, among the first questions interested people would
| ask about something like this are, "what can we use it for?"
| and "will it scale?"
| embedding-shape wrote:
| "what can we use it for?" I'd understand why someone would
| ask. Maybe not specifically in this case, as it's outlined
| in the abstract and paper itself, but I generally
| understand that.
|
| "will it scale?" I'm not so understanding of, for a
| submission about early research, it's one of the less
| interesting questions about it, and something you figure
| out much much later, and wouldn't invalidate these results
| no matter what the answer to that question is.
| Razengan wrote:
| Can I eat it? Can I fuck it? Will it eat me? Will it fuck
| me?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Interested people being investors I guess?
|
| My reaction is more, how does this work, what is it about
| mushrooms and mycelial networks, and sure, what is possible
| - but not, how soon can I monetize this
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Why would belief have anything to do with doing interesting
| research to see what can be done in this universe?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If we're ever going to colonize space or even do automated
| manufacturing in space on any scale we need to build a system
| which can manufacture "anything" that can be sent in a small
| number of launches and watched over by just a few people.
|
| Eric Drexler's "assembler" concept has been stuck for the last
| 25 years, but biological systems are a good model because if
| they can build you out of a cell they could build just about
| anything else out of a cell. This kind of mycelium network is
| running fast compared to the neurons in your brain.
| kulahan wrote:
| Using fungus in more advanced ways? Yeah for sure.
|
| Using shiitake mushrooms to build memristors for space? Eh.
|
| Just worth noting that fungus in general is a world we know
| very little about, despite them being more closely related to
| animals than plants are. It's why so many mushrooms tend to
| have healthy compounds in them. It's something we should be
| studying in any generic sense, just because the knowledge gap
| is so huge.
|
| Note: the reason it's dangerous to eat random fungus isn't
| because it's likely to kill us, but rather because they produce
| such an absolute plethora of chemicals that one is _bound_ to
| not mix well with us. False morels produce hydrazine! That 's
| rocket fuel!
| corysama wrote:
| Whatever happened to memristors? For a little while they were
| going to change computing. And, I haven't heard about them since.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Intel has the Optane drives but I think anyone in need just
| pays for the ram.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| That is because it is cool theoretically but not useful in
| practice. Every organic material is a memristor and even good
| memristors are not scalable.
|
| RRAM resistive switching is the far more useful property and
| this has already been investigated extensively.
| Razengan wrote:
| Yes please! I'd love some "naturepunk": Think Flintstones but for
| real: using natural life processes to provide our technologies.
|
| Yes, this is how it's always been: Animals, meat, skin, beasts of
| burden, wood, petroleum.
|
| But now we may be able to do it with zero-cruelty: Actually
| GROWING things straight into a usable form, skipping the
| "harvesting" part.
|
| (Though I hope we're not opening a whole new realm of misery..
| imagine being born as a chair and feeling ass all your existence)
| jdiff wrote:
| There's an interactive story that has elements of this[0]. Many
| of the simpler objects don't have much capacity to think or
| feel on their own, but the corru equivalent of elevators are
| fully sentient beings capable of conversation and problem
| solving, and they're just kind of built to be quite satisfied
| helping move people around. Corru computers are capable of
| hosting entire communities of distinct intelligences, each
| program sentient and (mostly) dedicated to its role. Not all of
| them can be chatted up, the authorization/access control
| program understandably isn't very chatty, but it is an
| intelligent being.
|
| It's a pretty enjoyable experience, and all of the graphics are
| ordinary HTML elements with 3D CSS transformations, which makes
| it super hackable and fun to crack open in an inspector.
|
| All that to say, if the best chairs required intelligence, it'd
| be in everyone's best interest to make that intelligence real
| thrilled about ass.
|
| [0] http://corru.observer/
| Razengan wrote:
| But not _too_ thrilled, mind you
| FieryTransition wrote:
| Imagine having a swarm of mushrooms everywhere to run computation
| on, if mushrooms could be programmed to expand and self arrange.
|
| Ah, like a knifes edge, but would be exciting. Could have a
| literal bug in the code.
| tengbretson wrote:
| HP fumbled the bag on this tech so hard that literal mushrooms
| are beating them to market.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| Was the fungus alive or dead? How did the memristive curve change
| depending on viability? Are all biological materials alive or
| dead memristors? In this case what is it about the property of
| the IV curves that is so ubiquitous? Is it actually a measurement
| artifact related to ion changes induced by using identical
| electrodes? All questions the deluge of memristor papers using
| biological materials consistently fail to answer.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| One of the best titles I've seen in a while!
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