this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body And Let It Run Wild (www.sciencealert.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by geese_feces@hexbear.net to c/science@hexbear.net
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An interdisciplinary team of researchers put a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface.

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.

https://youtu.be/5ZkkaM54RH8

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adk8019

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[–] Owl@hexbear.net 12 points 7 months ago

More science should be mad art experiments.

Also, they should put the robots in an otherwise sterile controlled environment, with more possible substrates scattered about, and periodically re-pot any new mushrooms into new robots and re-sterilize the environment. You know, give the mushrooms some time to evolve into this niche.