[HN Gopher] Fungal Electronics (2021)
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Fungal Electronics (2021)
Author : byt3h3ad
Score : 51 points
Date : 2026-03-11 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| byt3h3ad wrote:
| [from arxiv description] Fungal electronics is a family of living
| electronic devices made of mycelium bound composites or pure
| mycelium. Fungal electronic devices are capable of changing their
| impedance and generating spikes of electrical potential in
| response to external control parameters. Fungal electronics can
| be embedded into fungal materials and wearables or used as stand
| alone sensing and computing devices.
| observationist wrote:
| Feature size prevents computation from being fast, even if you
| could tweak it to create "organs" that did distributed
| processing. Basic limits of what cells can do would constrain the
| clock speed of any particular compute component to ~6khz or less,
| or about 100x what they can do naturally.
|
| A mycelial mat, coupled to a PCB, with a few genetic tweaks,
| though, could allow traditional computers to make use of
| incredible networks that have trillions of intersections; if you
| could somehow elicit the algorithm underlying human cortical
| networks, edit fungi to mirror that, you could get a potent AI
| hybrid device, about the size of a doormat, as thick as a
| paperback book, but it's not something where a little chip sized
| chunk of fungi is going to be useful for a wearable. You might do
| interesting things with robot sensors, if the electrical
| signaling translates to touch, maybe a thin network of mycelium
| over a robot could act as robot skin/touch/pressure sensors?
|
| Bravo, science, fun stuff. We're going to get autonomous cyber
| hybrid mushroom robots, like a "Last of Us" and "Terminator"
| hybrid.
| riskable wrote:
| That's all fine and good but it would be nice even if we just
| replaced the plastics used in PCBs with something that can
| biodegrade and/or renders itself harmless after going into the
| waste. Truly biodegradable electronics would be ideal but even
| minor improvements would make a big difference based on the
| sheer amount of electronics that get manufactured and
| distributed across the world every day.
|
| I remember reading about using magnesium instead of copper in
| PCBs a while back. I wonder what happened to that? Magnesium
| tracks on a fungus-based substrate would be fantastic (and
| neat!).
| contingencies wrote:
| _" Computers are useless, they can only give you answers"_ -
| Pablo Picasso, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
|
| I was looking at the fungi in my garden recently and realised
| there's such a variety of forms, there's no obvious reasons for
| many of them to exist. Are the fuzzy ones fuzzy because it
| creates vortices in the air affecting spore distribution? Or is
| it simply to avoid being eaten by certain types of critters? Are
| the tiny ones tiny because they are resource-starved, because
| their strategy is to avoid greater dehumidifying airflow and
| direct sun exposure above the grass-protected layer, or because
| they somehow produce greater viability spore distribution and
| don't need the volume of surface area to do so? Or are they
| planning to be eaten and have spore travel through digestive
| tract of slugs? The same question could be asked of huge ones,
| which are often found with chunks bitten out of them. Then
| there's some sort of weird fluffy one that occurs on moist ledges
| where you'd normally only expect bryophytes. Then you've got the
| slime molds which are sort of proto-fungi that just spam spore
| everywhere when it rains. All this makes me want to study them or
| possibly model some of the forms or strategies with biomimicry to
| better understand them. The main thing I take from all this is:
| if you have a large plurality of disparate fungi in your garden,
| it's healthy, because it's a bioindicator of multiple successful
| strategies in the local micro ecosystem.
| khrbrt wrote:
| A fun application of this is hooking mushrooms up to synthesizers
| for groovy beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbP2DgDp890
|
| Their channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BionicandtheWires
|
| > We connect bionic arms to fungi and plants so they can play
| music and be creative. Our art explores new ways of thinking
| about the natural world.
|
| >All life creates bio-electrical signals. Our equipment converts
| them into signals that control the bionic arms. Recent research
| suggests that fungi and plants exhibit surprising levels of
| intelligence, including decision-making, learning, memory and the
| ability to respond to sounds waves.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| Really fascinating paper. I wonder what kind of applications this
| could have in medical science.
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