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- Hacker News
- One of the best titles I've seen in a while!by Ericson2314
- 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.by lubujackson
- I don't recall this in snow crashby deelowe
- The Stone Sky series by NK Jemisin referenced the use of genetically modified fungi as self-assembling construction material. Really cool to see how pervasive mushrooms are in sci-fi and how there's lots more potential to unlock.
- Not advanced technology, but I recall Piers Anthony wrote about intelligent aliens.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Man_and_Manta (1968-1972)by clort
- It wasn't quite fungal, but Diamond Age had the Seed. The Seed grew any material/structure/device desired as opposed to the Matter Compilers and the Feed. We know that the Seed required tons of computing power to design and create, but the exact method of function of the Seed wasn't detailed. We do, however, know that it may have been nanotechnological as Nell had nanotechnology that her Mouse Army created to counter the nanites in the Drummers.by BirAdam
- HP fumbled the bag on this tech so hard that literal mushrooms are beating them to market.by tengbretson
- 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.
- Do we really believe that this kind of stuff has any chance of scaling and becoming generally useful?by joelthelion
- Using fungus in more advanced ways? Yeah for sure.
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!
by kulahan - Why would belief have anything to do with doing interesting research to see what can be done in this universe?by TheRealPomax
- Do we have to believe this will scale and be "generally useful" (whatever that means) in order for it to be interesting enough to talk, discuss and think about?
- If we're ever going to colonize space or even do automated manufacturing in space on any scale we need to build a system which can manufacture "anything" that can be sent in a small number of launches and watched over by just a few people.
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.
by PaulHoule - Whatever happened to memristors? For a little while they were going to change computing. And, I haven't heard about them since.by corysama
- That is because it is cool theoretically but not useful in practice. Every organic material is a memristor and even good memristors are not scalable.
RRAM resistive switching is the far more useful property and this has already been investigated extensively.
- Intel has the Optane drives but I think anyone in need just pays for the ram.by jayd16
- 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.
- If the fungus was dried how do ions move? Where is the memory effect. Hyphae collapse so maybe it is ions shuttling through the dead matrix?
- 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)
by Razengan - There's an interactive story that has elements of this[0]. Many of the simpler objects don't have much capacity to think or feel on their own, but the corru equivalent of elevators are fully sentient beings capable of conversation and problem solving, and they're just kind of built to be quite satisfied helping move people around. Corru computers are capable of hosting entire communities of distinct intelligences, each program sentient and (mostly) dedicated to its role. Not all of them can be chatted up, the authorization/access control program understandably isn't very chatty, but it is an intelligent being.
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.
by jdiff - 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.
by calibas - We basically just haven't studied it enough, but it's very clear that massive mycelial networks are doing something.
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.
- What would be the evolutionary advantage of this? I know nothing about biology so I'm struggling to see the use of such a network. Some kind of synchronization?by whereismyacc
- I thought this was fairly well proven at this point. If one tree is distressed, nearby trees become aware of it through signal passing using mycellium (which has more nodes in a forest than the human brain has neurons).
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).
by lubujackson - 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
by gnabgib - > 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.
- Preserved through dehydration? This means the fungus is dead.
- The memristor industry will mushroomby louthy
- Interesting new episodes of Air Crash Investigation coming up. Crucial avionics were inadvertently eaten by the inexperienced and hungry copilot.by card_zero
- As the young people say, Paul Stamets wants to "know your location".
Maybe we will figure out mushroom powered warp drive too some day.
by Onavo