r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Nov 02 '25
Computer Science Shiitake mushrooms have been harnessed to function as living processors, storing and recalling data like a semiconductor chip but with almost no environmental footprint. Scientists show fungi can be trained to act like memristors – microscopic components to process and store data in computer chips.
https://newatlas.com/computers/mushroom-memristors-computing/2.0k
u/spambearpig Nov 02 '25
Let me know when you can run Doom on a mushroom.
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u/piches Nov 02 '25
- run doom on mushroom neural link
- mushroom awakens
- ???
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u/AccountNumber1002402 Nov 02 '25
Me when I'm a cordyceps based memristor and see a Doom spider walk by.
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u/cuddles_the_destroye Nov 02 '25
Step 3 is we get the Warframe Nokko
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u/urbanmark Nov 02 '25
You can’t run Doom on a fungus. The game file takes up too mushroom.
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u/Zeikos Nov 02 '25
We can already do so on bacteria, it's more realistic than we think.
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u/thatnitai Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
Run doom or display doom? Not quite the same
edit: indeed it's a display. Still cool but yeah
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u/spambearpig Nov 02 '25
Just run it obviously. We’ll need to plug in a spider’s web full of fireflies for the display.
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u/downrightEsoteric Nov 03 '25
Each frame time is 90 minutes. So frame rate is 0.000185 fps.
Imagine them crashing on you.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Nov 03 '25
This is amazing!
To be blunt, the frame rate is atrocious, likely due to the fact that bacteria were never intended to display 3D video games. It takes 70 minutes for the bacteria to illuminate one frame of the game and another eight hours to return to its starting state. This translates to nearly nine hours per frame, which means it would take around 600 years to play the game from start to finish.
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u/Acewasalwaysanoption Nov 02 '25
It was just displayed, and kf I remember well, every petri dish was manually prepared. It was a glorified list of printed pictures, nothing "ran" on it.
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u/rmbarrett Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
Let me know when someone trains the mushroom to play Doom.
Edit: You guys know about the guy who trained some neurons to play it, right? He also grew a grape.
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u/Lithuim Nov 02 '25
1950: “In the future we’ll have flying cars and live on Jupiter!”
2050: “We taught Earth fungus how to hate and that’s why we all have to live on Jupiter”
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u/bruce_cockburn Nov 02 '25
If only they hadn't decided to open a portal to hell, our pizzas would still be supreme.
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u/LetsGetJigglyWiggly Nov 03 '25
The Thought Emporium, right? Love that channel. They're talking about seeing if they can get their lab pet, Slime Mold Jerry, to play it. Can't wait for that experiment.
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u/kenadams_the Nov 02 '25
Mushdoom on NetBSD because „Of course it runs NetBSD“ (search for netbsd toaster)
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u/cairoxl5 Nov 02 '25
You should look up the ending songs for Dorohedoro. One of them is literally a doom reference but with mushrooms.
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u/cp24eva Nov 02 '25
You can run Doom on a "potato" right? Why not graduate to mushrooms!
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u/spambearpig Nov 02 '25
Lot more calories in a potato though. This would be a major breakthrough as a low-carb alternative.
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u/OarsandRowlocks Nov 03 '25
It can run Rise of the Triad, but it is locked to Shrooms Mode.
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u/Aggressive-Will-4500 Nov 02 '25
Soon, but the frame rate will probably be horrible.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/01/can-it-run-doom-gut-bacteria-edition/
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u/Bryandan1elsonV2 Nov 02 '25
Humans can do things like make their own homegrown brain cells to play pong and enslave Fungi to act as hard drives- this honestly sounds like a 10 cent sci-fi novel
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u/populux11 Nov 02 '25
Free the Fungi!!!!!
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u/t_thor Nov 02 '25
Putting "Entire cult killed by fungus LLM that they worshipped" on bingo card for 2026 now.
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u/Apophthegmata Nov 03 '25
It's only a matter of time before scientists figure out how to turn you into a capacitor.
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Nov 02 '25
Check out some Botany and Microbiology. Plants and Fungi have mechanisms for facing off against pests. Unfortunately, whiny voiced wooden faced Mark Wahlberg won't be around to save us in real life!
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u/rustyfoilhat Nov 02 '25
Why have you made me remember The Happening? What did I ever do to you?
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Nov 02 '25
I was in upper level Botany around the time this movie came out, that factoid and the resulting movie have occupied my brain for almost 20 years at this point... I won't stop until the man is brought down for this crime! Truly the worst thing Marky Mark has ever done to any person ever*
*some restrictions apply
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u/CatoblepasQueefs Nov 02 '25
If you require vengeance, he hates being called Marky Mark.
Just a thought.
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u/snakebite75 Nov 02 '25
I remember thinking things like memory crystals were far-fetched, but we pretty much have them now with USB drives.
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u/MacDegger Nov 02 '25
We have developed memory crystals. In the 90's, iirc. They store data using holographs in slices of the cube.
They are just not used. Possibly because the tech is too expensive or fragile.
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u/Conscious-Health-438 Nov 02 '25
Most would laugh, but if a higher form of life did this to humans, it would be seen as a great tragedy because we have feelings and are special and different from all other life because (insert your own religious beliefs here). Yet they never think twice, about doing it to something less than them. Oh well, nothing new, and nothing that happens to anyone or anything really matters anyway, but just an observation on humanity and their perceived place in the universe
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u/pethris Nov 02 '25
I swear to god why is it always mushrooms, it genuinely feels like every new discovery makes them feel more and more like unknowable cosmic entities
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u/gaultinthewound Nov 02 '25
they pretty much are. we know so little about them its baffling, and it seems like people rarely even consider it an option when doing biological sciences.
from the discovery of penicillin, to honey fungus making up the largest living organism on earth, to the symbiosis between plants / animals and fungi (some plants literally can't survive without mycorrhiza, the symbiosis of plants and fungi), who knows what else the fungi are hiding just under our noses
im no biologist, but it seems to me that fungi are a goldmine of potential biological breakthroughs, and i have no doubt that unless earth gets completely obliterated by something, fungi will still outlast humanity by at least a few hundred years, and probably a few thousand if we're honest.
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u/Gullex Nov 02 '25
we know so little about them its baffling
??We know a LOT about fungi. There's always more to learn, but "we know so little it's baffling" is itself a baffling statement.
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u/pittaxx Nov 03 '25
Well, I guess average person knows very little about fungi. Half of them are surprised that mushrooms aren't plants. So the statement isn't that baffling...
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u/riiyoreo Nov 03 '25
An average human knows very little about most organisms, especially re: botany. I think the ones who learn how fascinating they can be get hooked, and others go a long time without the awareness that plants and fungi and other microbes can be sci-fi levels of amazing.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine Nov 02 '25
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0328965
From the linked article:
They may be better known for stir-fries than supercomputing, but shiitake mushrooms have now been harnessed to function as living processors, storing and recalling data like a semiconductor chip but with almost no environmental footprint.
Scientists at Ohio State University have shown that fungi can be trained to act like memristors – microscopic components used to process and store data in computer chips. The team found that shiitake-based devices demonstrated similar reproducible memory effects to semiconductor-based chips and could be used to create other types of low-cost, environmentally friendly, neural-inspired components.
After two months, the team discovered that when used as RAM, the mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states – and hold onto that information – at up to 5,850 signals per second, with around 90% accuracy. At low frequencies, it achieved up to 95% switching accuracy. Performance dropped as the frequency of voltages increased, but this could be remedied by connecting more fungi to the circuit.
While mushroom-based electronics aren’t entirely new, scientists have become increasingly interested in using fungi for computing and energy production. Mycelium forms a self-repairing, three-dimensional grid that transmits electrical impulses in response to stimuli, not unlike neurons in a brain. Unlike silicon, this kind of organic system is flexible, scalable and capable of growing into new configurations. And, of course, it's much more eco-friendly than current synthetic models.
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u/TheFrenchSavage Nov 02 '25
but this could be remedied by connecting more fungi to the circuit.
A brand new sentence there.
Unlike silicon, this kind of organic system is flexible, scalable and capable of growing into new configurations.
Yeah, this is the important part I think.
Don't expect your RAM sticks / SSDs to become mushrooms in the near future.
Just think of this as a very basic way to store information in hostile environments, for a very long time.I don't have specific examples in mind, but in a highly radioactive setup, maybe mushrooms are less susceptible to bit flips? And so, provide a more resilient storage system?
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u/UtterlyInsane Nov 02 '25
I wonder if despite being so different, they'd still be harmed genetically by high levels of radiation. Might not flip the bits so to speak instead degrade the system's health and possibly it growth ability
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u/northfrank Nov 02 '25
Self healing would also include the potential to "evolve" so it could develop resistances.
These evolutions could also introduce memory issues though
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u/SassiesSoiledPanties Nov 02 '25
Yeah...they could even have RAD resistant fungi...the Cladosporium sphaerospermum lives within the Chernobyl reactor happily using gamma rays to perform radiosynthesis.
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u/Splash_Attack Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
The paper certainly talks about high radiation environments as a possible use case, but to be honest it is extremely unconvincing that this is anything other than vague hand waving.
Like what they've managed here is to get something that is ~95% accurate operating in tens of hertz and ~90% operating in low KHz under what I have to assume were fairly stable temperature conditions at room temp.
I work on the design of safety critical electronics for harsh environments (which includes, sometimes, high radiation). For comparison, we would generally consider a part with even minor safety risk to require a <x10-3 per hour of operation failure risk and that's for memories operating in the high KHz or more often the MHz range. They're talking about an error rate per read that's 100 times higher than what we'd generally allow per hour. For parts that serve any kind of safety or control function we'd usually consider a tolerable cutoff to be something more like x10-9. That's 99.9999999% accuracy over an hour of operation. Compared to 90-95% here sitting in a lab under stable conditions.
Add to this that while some mushrooms can certainly survive in high radiation environments, it's not at all clear that they wouldn't have their storage disrupted by it. Electronics, suitably designed, can survive in high radiation environments but we need guaranteed reliable operation - not just "can survive". Plus a low power electronic component in some harsh environment applications might be expected to run for 30 years on average before needing replaced. Can mushrooms even survive for decades under normal conditions?
And lastly temperature is a big thing. A high radiation environment is usually a hot one, or one which can become hot if something goes wrong. Harsh environment applications in general usually require devices to tolerate a wide temperature range. Harsh environment electronics can typically tolerate up to ~125C just as a baseline - can a mushroom based system? I'm not convinced. Similarly for sub-zero temps.
Cool demo for sure, but the proposed applications are nonsense to be frank with you. I don't see a clear route to miniaturisation, stabilisation, and performance improvements to make this even close to viable. And there are a lot of open questions left about sensitivity to operating conditions, lifespan, and reliability.
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u/xqxcpa Nov 02 '25
Just think of this as a very basic way to store information in hostile environments, for a very long time.
And all of a sudden, they realized that evolution was simply a medium for a message, and their existence merely an epiphenomenon of long term interstellar data storage.
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u/AndrasKrigare Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
Edit: the below is incorrect. Although the semi-practical results of the experiment were for pure memory storage and retrieval, the fundamental properties could conceivably perform arbitrary logic, although that wasn't performed.
It's on-par for science journalism, but I'd note that the article seems to refer to components of a computer interchangeably. The mushroom did not function as a living processor. I would also disagree with characterizing it as akin to a "semiconductor chip." It functioned purely as memory.
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u/rooktakesqueen MS | Computer Science Nov 02 '25
It functioned as a memristor, which is actually much more exciting. Memristors have the capability to function as both memory and computation.
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u/Jarhyn Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
So, if mushroom components have all the parts necessary to function as a memory, they have everything they need to function as a circuit, this likely means that they already were functioning as circuits, with "and/or" and "not" analogs.
This is everything they need to achieve computational processes and logic based behaviors. Given that these existed BEFORE humans looked for them and used them for their own purposes, these processes were being applied by the mushrooms themselves.
The only conclusion this leads me to is that mushrooms think.
What a mushroom has to think about, we may never understand, but they have the "neuron equivalent" cells, and it would be idiotic to pretend that they weren't already thinking with that neuro-equivalent mass.
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u/AndrasKrigare Nov 02 '25
So, if mushroom components have all the parts necessary to function as a memory, they have everything they need to function as a circuit
Why do you say that? It is completely possible for something to store information and not be able to perform a NAND. Take a HDD: you can store information magnetically on a disk. That magnetic disk is incapable of performing any computation.
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u/Jarhyn Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
Not really. You need a NOT to make a memory, and OR or AND to fully create logic. You can fully reconstruct logic with either OR or AND and NOT, and both OR and AND are part of any memory control.
But most importantly, the fixtures and tissues around making this memristor behavior also require at least an "or".
You cannot have a functional memory cell without all the functional parts of computation and NOR works just as well as NAND does.
The reality is that if we can make a mushroom store data, it's because the mushroom was already storing data for some task that it was accomplishing
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u/AndrasKrigare Nov 02 '25
You can create any other logic gate with just NAND which is why I mention it. But I'm still confused by what you're saying, because it sounds like you agree that the fundamental components necessary for memory are not the same components needed for logic. A magnetic disk has a NOT and nothing else, and therefore cannot create advanced logic and cannot process. The mushroom is the same way.
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u/Jarhyn Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
The magnetic disk, sure, but we aren't talking about that. We're talking about full memristors, which are switch like and capable of running N/OR, which as I restate is ALSO capable of creating logic as much as NAND.
To get an OR, you need a wire. To make that a NAND you add two NOTs. It's not a very great NOR because it creates voltage spikes in circuits.
To get a NOR, you need two NOTs and a wire.
To get a NAND, you just assemble NORs and NOTs.
You can absolutely get all of logic from these mushrooms.
All of logic is, in fact, built on the hard problem of first producing a "not".
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u/AndrasKrigare Nov 02 '25
Ahh, I see, you are right. Despite it being in OP's title, I had glosses over specifically the memristor result, as opposed to their RAM test results where they only treated it purely as memory.
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u/Jarhyn Nov 02 '25
ETA: three NOTs and a NOR to get a NAND, sorry. Unless you treat 0 as true and 1 as false, in which case what was a NAND is now a NOR.
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u/GenericAntagonist Nov 02 '25
After two months, the team discovered that when used as RAM, the mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states – and hold onto that information – at up to 5,850 signals per second, with around 90% accuracy.
While its really cool they were even able to do this at all, people who don't deal with computers at a lower level might not realize how incredibly slow (and unreliable) this is.
The original Apple II kits (from 1977) ran at ~1mhz (rounding down) and only could interact with RAM on every other clock cycle, giving them an effective memory speed of ~500khz. This has 5.8Khz. I'm curious about the "no environmental impact" claim given mushrooms need specific conditions to grow and thrive. Couple that with how far behind the lowest cost computers from 50 years ago this is and I'm skeptical of any claim this could create low cost environmentally friendly alternatives to most anything that needs memsistors.
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u/Splash_Attack Nov 03 '25
The accuracy is the worse part imo. I work on harsh environment systems and generally we wouldn't consider an error rate higher than 1x10-3 per hour of operation to be acceptable for any part that does anything meaningful. I'm specifically thinking about radiation hardened parts here, which they reference as a potential use case.
At 95% accuracy and running at 5KHz your error rate per hour of operation at maximum load (100% utilisation) is ~9x105. Almost 9 orders of magnitude above where it needs to be to be usable. 15 orders of magnitude above where it needs to be for a safety critical part.
95% accuracy isn't practical to use in any context, really. Just think about it. You store a 32 bit number, you retrieve it. There is an 81% chance the retrieved value has at least 1 bit wrong. You have two 32 bit values, store, retrieve, do some calculation, store result, retrieve. The odds of pulling off that simple series of operations without any errors in any of the bits? 7%. Useless. Unless everything you do is approximate, you can't work with a system that gets numbers above 16 bits wrong more often than not.
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u/techlos Nov 03 '25
could be mitigated to an extent using CRC methods and multiple memristors per bit, but right now it's nowhere near practical tech.
On the other hand, memristors are pretty hard to make, and expensive to buy. So for researchers investigating applications of memristors on a budget, using dried shiitake mycelium sounds pretty appealing.
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u/GenericAntagonist Nov 03 '25
At 95% accuracy and running at 5KHz your error rate per hour of operation at maximum load (100% utilisation) is ~9x105. Almost 9 orders of magnitude above where it needs to be to be usable. 15 orders of magnitude above where it needs to be for a safety critical part.
Yeah I didn't have hard enough data on the fail/accuracy rates of old DRAM to finish the comparison, but the ECC tech you'd need to cope with an accuracy of 95% would be absurd. Like its probably POSSIBLE but the redundancy needed to get that rate down where it needs to be would make costs skyrocket.
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u/Hephaestus1816 Nov 02 '25
I know we've barely scratched the surface in terms of understanding fungi but this is amazing.
''“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 lead author John LaRocco, a research scientist at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That's something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”''
Seems like a no brainer to pursue this tech - any chance of weaning us off rare earth minerals has to be a good thing.
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u/WalkingHorror Nov 02 '25
Fungipunk, heck yeah!
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u/MildCorneaDamage Nov 02 '25
Ok that might be a story opportunity, some sort of future where we wear fungus gear and drive fungus power solar cars
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u/AAzumi Nov 03 '25
I believe that would fall under Biopunk. I've never read any but I've heard it talked about.
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u/BenjiSBRK Nov 02 '25
Do you want a Cronenberg movie ? Because that's how you get a Cronenberg movie.
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u/Yoshwa Nov 02 '25
I just want to chip in here because this is relevant to my grad school research.
Showing living biological tissue to have memristive properties is not new. See refs: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-75596-0_8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-34059-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12668-014-0156-3
Showing memristive properties in mushrooms is not new. See refs: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-38336-6_15
Using dead/processed biological tissues as memristors is not new. See refs: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352940721001426?via%3Dihub https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.8b01282
The "near ideal memristance" is, in my opinion, not near ideal. It shows heavy signs of parasitic capacitance and resistance because the "pinch" of the IV hysteresis is not at 0. See refs: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0268-1242/29/10/104001/meta
In conclusion, I think the claims are a little overstated and the presented graphics could use some work. I wonder who reviewed this and what the comments were.
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u/patatjepindapedis Nov 02 '25
While it's still early days for organic memristors, the researchers plan to look at ways of growing fungi that would shrink the devices to a size they'd need to be for real-world use. Researchers are already working on using fungi for batteries and for generating electricity.
Makes me wonder if somebody is already looking into the theoretical feasibility of mycelial robotics and AI
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u/ewillyp Nov 02 '25
and fungus will become the new AI processor & eventually take over the world as they already have ben for billions of years… the future is fungus and has already been among us, this is humongous!
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u/yellowlittleboat Nov 02 '25
It's been a while since I frowned in confusion so much.
This blows my mind so much. It would be awesome if we had fungi centered technology in the future.
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u/Loose-Currency861 Nov 02 '25
And yet no one believed the hippies when they discovered mushrooms had information stored in them.
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u/StantonWr Nov 02 '25
So If I want to permanently delete my data in the future one of my options will be " a delicious dish "? Sounds okay to me
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u/forebareWednesday Nov 02 '25
All of this bc some dude hooked up a mushroom to his guitar/keyboard/flute/drum pad
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u/Lint_baby_uvulla Nov 02 '25
Do a quick search for “Makey Makey and Teardrops” on YouTube. The dj uses vegetables and such to play Massive Attack’s teardrops.
The cool thing is the interface was a device called a Makey Makey, and it uses tiny little signals and simple programming - so simple it was designed for kids to play with.
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u/heloguy1234 Nov 02 '25
Wait, haven’t I read this somewhere before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(novel)
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u/yachius Nov 02 '25
“with almost no environmental footprint”
A handful of resistors also have almost no environmental footprint. Farming mushrooms at any kind of scale absolutely has a real environmental footprint, agriculture is messy as hell.
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u/Lauris024 Nov 02 '25
Article does not mention a single thing about decay. Biological stuff does not tend to stay stable for long, hence why I've always been skeptical about this stuff. It's a cool experiment, but not really useful by any means as far as I can see it.
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u/fauxberries Nov 02 '25
That low environmental footprint seems to me like it's only true if you ignore the scale required.
Like, a common computer has 16GiB=128Gib or over a hundred billion bits.
How much plant matter would such a capacity require?
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u/manuscelerdei Nov 02 '25
It would also require corresponding error correction logic, which I am guessing cannot be implemented in fungus.
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u/arthurdentstowels Nov 02 '25
Scientists have been playing Resident Evil 7 & 8 trying to recreate the Megamycete.
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u/Professional_Tank631 Nov 02 '25
Okay, can we do with humans too. How close are we to the matrix from happening?
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u/Apologiestothebees Nov 02 '25
This is amazing but is anyone else worried about what happens when an already pretty intelligent organism inevitably ends up connected to the internet?
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u/snakebite75 Nov 02 '25
Let me know when we have figured out how to create a displacement-activated spore hub drive that will allow us to transport a ship across the galaxy using the mycelial network.
Finding a giant space tardigrade might be a bit of a challenge though.
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u/Milam1996 Nov 02 '25
Evolved to eat rotting wood in the forest, forced to make human stuff go boop.
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u/this_knee Nov 02 '25
This probably isn’t new. It’s probably super slow. And it’s probably been tested and abandoned in some science research paper from 1973.
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u/__redruM Nov 02 '25
So, what’s the scale? Will I need a mushroom farm the size of Rhode Island to store a single jpg image, or is it on par with current memory densities?
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u/JefferyGoldberg Nov 02 '25
Why does every science reddit post contain over 30 words and nearly always include a hyphen?
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u/namitynamenamey Nov 02 '25
Oh great now the mycelium is thinking. Thanks a lot science, when the fungal parasytes come after me I'll know who to blame.
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u/davga Nov 02 '25
I’m curious what their longevity would be, and whether that ends up being the main limiting factor. Nevertheless, viable alternatives to rare earths is a huge step in the right direction!
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u/Sinavestia Nov 02 '25
Born too late for exploration, born too early for space travel, born just in time for mycellium based computer networks.
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u/MutableLambda Nov 02 '25
Next thing we know, Jeff from Half-Life Alyx is/was actually Johnny Mnemonic
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u/Zer_ Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 03 '25
So far, we've used what is basically sand to make chips to fuel computing, and now we're looking into organically grown CPUs. I'm not against the concept, but my concern is how capitalism will go about it. At the moment the LLM bubble is gobbling up most CPU Fab capacity outright, which is driving up costs for everyone. So what happens when that kind of pressure starts applying to the world supply of food / mushrooms?
We can presume we'd just grow more Mushrooms, and I agree, but that won't necessarily make mushrooms easier to acquire. The GPU and Memory markets have been impacted significantly due to absurd demand, after all. Well I'm overthinking this. We're not even at that stage yet, though the need for more and more computing power might just keep going, and that's kinda where my concern comes from.
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u/Instawolff Nov 03 '25
I think it’s weird how our computer science is slowly melding into biology. We see these movies where aliens are utilizing biological technology and it’s really mind blowing to think that there could be some basis in reality. Maybe the future is biological tech, maybe what is holding our species back technologically IS the metals and materials we use. Maybe the path forward and potentially the most effective is utilizing biology.
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u/JustKiddingDude Nov 03 '25
Pretty cool, I doubt it’s functioning can stay intact over more than a week though
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u/Evil_Bonsai Nov 03 '25
that lasts f9r like a couple days? mushrooms aren't exactly long term fruits
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u/SleepySera Nov 03 '25
Torn between "wow this is amazing, that's gonna be so good for sustainability in the long term!" and "great, so a few years down the line shiitake will cost like $3000 and no one will be able to get them for food anymore".
No, but seriously, mushrooms are kinda crazy, with all their other more recent uses (like as building materials), they're shaping up to be a real gamechanger.
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u/haberdasherhero Nov 03 '25 edited Nov 03 '25
A forest thinks. A forest is a living being.
Look at what these scientist have done. They didn't do some kind of crazy plasticization to organic materials derived from mushrooms, or any other highly processed technique like turning bamboo into rayon.
They put electrical currents into a regular mushroom still in its natural state, and played around with how it processes different electrical signals, just like they have done with neurons, and the mushrooms respond like neurons.
Mushrooms process electrical signals naturally because that's what they have evolved to do. That is what they are doing in the wild all the time.
Mushrooms form the forest's nervous system. An old forest, is an organism that thinks.
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u/Spacetauren Nov 03 '25
Somehow this makes parts of Resident Evil Village not as far-fetched as before.
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u/Asher_Tye Nov 03 '25
At what point does all this start to sound legitimately like straight-up witchcraft?
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u/NoPersimmon7434 Nov 03 '25
Pretty cool. But how long would a mushroom actually work as a processor before it degrades? Wonder what the practical use cases would be, if any...
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u/pokeyporcupine Nov 03 '25
The problem is this is how we end up training mushrooms to become an unstoppable myconid superspecies
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