HN Reader

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

> 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.

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.

Do we really believe that this kind of stuff has any chance of scaling and becoming generally useful?

Most wet organic or biological materials will produce memristive (pinched hysteresis) IV curves when measured with macroelectrodes (1–20 mm contact scale) due to inherent interfacial electrochemistry, ion migration, or redox processes at the electrode-tissue interface.

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.

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.

HP fumbled the bag on this tech so hard that literal mushrooms are beating them to market.

Whatever happened to memristors? For a little while they were going to change computing. And, I haven't heard about them since.

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.

One of the best titles I've seen in a while!

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.

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)