The study details how everyday mushrooms, like shiitake, can be grown and 'trained' to act as organic memristors.
It turns out that mushrooms could become a part of future computers. Researchers at The Ohio State University are studying this possibility. They have proposed that common edible fungi could change how we process and store digital data.
The study details how everyday mushrooms, like shiitake, can be grown and “trained” to act as organic memristors. A memristor is a data processor that remembers past electrical states.In experiments, the shiitake devices showed repeatable “memory effects,” similar to semiconductor chips. This proves that mushroom-based devices could be used to create low-cost, eco-friendly, “brain-inspired computing components.”“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don’t need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn’t being used,” said John LaRocco, lead author and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That’s something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage,” LaRocco added. Testing the fungiMushrooms have always been lauded for their incredible resilience and unique biological properties. These innate traits make them perfect candidates for bioelectronics, a new field dedicated to developing novel materials for next-generation computing.Fungal electronics are an ideal, sustainable option for computing systems. According to LaRocco, the materials are biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional semiconductors, which require costly rare-earth minerals and high amounts of energy from data centers.The use of fungal electronics would thus minimize electrical waste.“Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits,” he said.The Ohio State team specifically focused on shiitake and button mushrooms, cultivating the fungi before dehydrating them for long-term viability.The researchers connected electrical wires and probes to different points on the mushrooms. This was done because various parts of the fungi have different electrical properties, resulting in varied performances based on the applied voltage and connectivity.As computer memory , the fungal device successfully changed its electrical states at speeds reaching 5,850 signals every second. Interestingly, it maintained about 90% accuracy after two months.However, the performance suffered when the electrical voltage frequency rose, but the issue could be corrected by simply adding more mushrooms to the circuit.Sustainable alternative The scalability of fungal computing also presents exciting possibilities. Larger mushroom systems could find applications in edge computing and aerospace exploration, while smaller iterations might enhance autonomous systems and wearable devices.While organic memristors are still nascent and require further miniaturization, the researchers are optimistic. LaRocco thinks of a future where “Everything you’d need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics, or as big as a culturing factory with pre-made templates. All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.”If successful, this fungal-based technology would be a sustainable alternative. It could replace the energy-intensive metal devices used in our digital world today.The study was published in the journal PLOS One.
Energy &Amp Environment Fungi Inventions And Machines Mushroom Mushroom Devices Organic Memristors Shiitake
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