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
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.
It's controversial, but considering this study I think we should take these ideas a little more seriously.
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).
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.
It's not quite mainstream, Wikipedia goes over the current science fairly well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network
Weird perspective, they were here long before us, and are even some of the earliest forms of complex life on the planet :)
The response:
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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?
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That’s a wild answer lol. Although it technically did answer the question.
"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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
Ah, like a knifes edge, but would be exciting. Could have a literal bug in the code.
Downloadable as 'uqm' in debian
RRAM resistive switching is the far more useful property and this has already been investigated extensively.
But 6kHz is not nothing. For application-specific computers, you can do a lot with very little. You aren't going to be building high performance general purpose computers, but for an atonomous circuit quietly ticking away computing orbital trajectories or stellar navigation, you don't need modern x86 class performance.
I don't think it's absurd to hypothesize that a mycelial structure as complex and interconnected as an animal brain might have similarly complex emergent properties. It's an extraordinary claim, but really not out of the question. We just need to go and find out.
edit: turns out the Wikipedia page is extensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network?wprov=sfla...
Macroscale memristivity is an artifact of slow interfacial kinetics sampled over large diffusion volumes. Shrink electrodes below ~100 µm → hysteresis vanishes.
Dry biological materials almost never show true memristive (pinched, history-dependent) IV curves at any electrode scale (macro or micro) under standard DC sweeps. The reasons are structural and physicochemical—drying eliminates the ionic mobility that sustains memory.
The previous, it gets better the closer to TNG it is. Granted DS9 was a different beast than TNG or Voyager. Those shows had episodes, individual stories, as well as seasonal arcs. Back when shows were written for TV. New Trek feels like a bad movie script broken into episodes with side character filler.