The modern computer era arguably began with the creation of the ENIAC, which looked, well, like this:
Now, nearly a century later, we can make computers as small as mushrooms.
Literally, as ZME Science reports:
You can grow a computer on your kitchen counter. Well, sort of. That's the radical implication of new research from The Ohio State University, where scientists have turned humble shiitake mushrooms into living electronic devices that can remember information.
In their new study, psychiatrist and research scientist John LaRocco and colleagues describe a fungus-based computing system that mimics how neurons process information.
As an aside, I don't know about you but I'm not feeling great about the idea of eating something that can "remember information!"
I guess one doesn't encounter shiitake mushrooms every day, at least not in the United States. And evidently if you encounter one in the future, it may be in the form of a "mushristor," or mushroom-based memory risistor:
[The researchers] turned to shiitake mushrooms (Lentinula edodes), known for their resilience and peculiar sensitivity to electrical stimuli. So, the researchers grew the fungi in Petri dishes filled with farro, wheat germ, and hay until the mycelium formed a dense white mat. Then they dried the samples in sunlight, rehydrated them just enough to restore conductivity, and connected them to an Arduino-powered circuit.
Sure, all that sounds like it makes sense!
Hearing about a mushroom computer, of course, is all very interesting. Seeing it requires a bit of a leap of faith, however:
I'll have to take their word for it, though to be sure these very early results sound promising: "At low frequencies, the fungal chips switched states at up to 5,850 signals per second with about 90% accuracy. At slower voltages, that number climbed to 95%, rivaling the speed and precision of early silicon-based memristors."
The scientists aren't being polyannas. There's a long way to go here. But the implications are certainly something to get excited over:
Shrinking fungal memristors down to nanoscale will take years of engineering and experimentation. Yet even in their current form, they're a proof of concept for something astonishing: computers that grow, adapt, and decay like living things.
Can't wait for the release of the "Apple Mushroom" in 2075!
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