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Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body And Let It Run Wild
Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells.
Easily cultured with relatively simple requirements and a propensity to survive where many other organisms would struggle, molds and mushrooms could provide engineers with a variety of robust living components to suit just about every sensory or even computational need. By applying algorithms based on the extracellular electrophysiology of P. eryngii mycelia and feeding the output into a microcontroller unit, the researchers used spikes of activity triggered by a stimulus – in this case, UV light – to toggle mechanical responses in two different kinds of mobile device. As clumsy as 'roboshroom' might look, the true value of the system may one day be realized in simpler mechanical setups that interpret complex shifts in environmental cues to deliver precise amounts of nutrient or pesticide to a soil environment, or automatically tailor responses to rising levels of pollutant or even react to changes in our own bodies.
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