Shiitake Memristors
DRAM prices go up, and suddenly everyone becomes a botanist. This week’s entry in “things you will try before paying for a 256 GB kit” is mushrooms as computer memory.
Researchers at The Ohio State University tested shiitake (I swear this is a name for fungi) and button mushroom mycelium as organic memristors. They grew the mycelium, dehydrated it for days, attached electrodes, then gave it a quick mist to bring conductivity back. After that, they ran different waveforms and voltages through it to see if the resistance “remembers” what happened before.
At around 1 volt, the behavior was the most consistent. They even pushed it toward RAM like operation, hitting almost 6 kHz with about 90% accuracy.
Source: Plos
How to
They grew shiitake mycelium in Petri dishes on a farro seed, wheat germ, and hay substrate at 20 to 22C and 70% humidity. Then they dried the dishes under direct sunlight for about seven days until the sample turned into a rigid disk. Before testing, they brought conductivity back with a light mist of deionized water from about 10 cm away, then hooked up electrodes and measured I V curves with an oscilloscope.
No, you can’t store gigabytes of data this way, unless you have a field(s) of mushrooms. So this is not a fix for memory price hikes. Memristor-style retention alone is not enough. You still need usable capacity, density, interfaces, stability, and a way to scale it into something that looks like real modules. However, if AI firms are interested in finding a cheap way to store memory, just be our guest and use all the mushrooms you want. Just leave desktop memory alone.
Source: Hackaday , Journals Plos
