Home | Community | Message Board

Avalon Magic Plants
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Original Sensible Seeds Bulk Cannabis Seeds   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
Invisiblekoppie
astral projectile
Male

Registered: 07/23/04
Posts: 2,653
Loc: cloud hidden
Scientists develop cyborg fungus
    #5298017 - 02/14/06 03:31 AM (17 years, 11 months ago)

You thought the mold on your PF jars was scary? Now they have developed a robot controlled by a slime mold. Watch out for contams taking over the world Terminator style!

Or maybe not, but it's still an interesting development and a point in favour of Paul Stamets' claim that fungi are intelligent, even if it's a very rudimentary intelligence.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8718

Quote:


Robot moved by a slime mould's fears
18:21 13 February 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight

A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot.

The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself.

Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southampton, UK, who developed the slime-controlled bot with colleagues from Kobe University in south-central Japan, says the idea is to find simpler ways to control a robot?s behaviour.

"The computers we have today are very good for what we built them for," he told New Scientist. "But, in a complex or paradoxical environment, things tend not to work out."

Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner's team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot.

Mechanical embodiment

They grew slime in a six-pointed star shape on top of a circuit and connected it remotely, via a computer, to the hexapod bot. Any light shone on sensors mounted on top of the robot were used to control light shone onto one of the six points of the circuit-mounted mould ? each corresponding to a leg of the bot.

As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot's six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould. Eventually, this type of control could be incorporated into the bot itself rather than used remotely.

Zauner believes engineers will need to look towards this type of simple control mechanism, especially as components are scaled down. "On the nanoscale, we have to learn how to work with autonomous components," he says. "We have to let molecules do what they naturally do."

Available energy

Biology is already influencing the evolution of robots in other ways. For example, researchers led by Chris Melhuish at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, have developed robots that generate power by consuming flies.

"Computational autonomy has been studied for some time,? says Ioannis Ieropoulos of the University of Western England team. ?For a truly autonomous robot, the level of computational complexity will depend on the available energy.?

Details of the slime-bot project were presented at the Second International Workshop on Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology, held in Osaka, Japan, on 26 and 27 January.





Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleAndroctonus
Stranger
Male User Gallery

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 09/17/05
Posts: 1,479
Loc: L.I.S.
Re: Scientists develop cyborg fungus [Re: koppie]
    #5298020 - 02/14/06 03:44 AM (17 years, 11 months ago)

Wow, that was interesting. Thanks for posting that. :thumbup:


--------------------
The red grass, up to my knees
An aura comes towards me

Someone's changed the formula
Un-chaining another law

The structures, the colors
Uniform chaos is alternating

The nature of things


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblekoppie
astral projectile
Male

Registered: 07/23/04
Posts: 2,653
Loc: cloud hidden
Re: Scientists develop cyborg fungus [Re: Androctonus]
    #5298042 - 02/14/06 04:11 AM (17 years, 11 months ago)
Log in to view attachment

Update: I have attached the original research paper in pdf format, for the real geeks.

originally found at:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11749/


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
Re: Scientists develop cyborg fungus [Re: koppie]
    #5298398 - 02/14/06 08:30 AM (17 years, 11 months ago)

hmmm, interesting stuff. :thumbup:


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleAsante
Mage
Male User Gallery

Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 86,795
Re: Scientists develop cyborg fungus [Re: koppie]
    #5298448 - 02/14/06 08:59 AM (17 years, 11 months ago)

Quote:

robots that generate power by consuming flies.




This is VERY scary. A carnivorous robot, feeding off biological life forms.


--------------------
Omnicyclion.org
higher knowledge starts here


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblechodamunky
Cheers!

Registered: 02/28/02
Posts: 2,030
Loc: sailing the seas of chees...
Re: Scientists develop cyborg fungus [Re: koppie]
    #5299803 - 02/14/06 04:12 PM (17 years, 11 months ago)

heh, I'd like to follow a few of these robots around in a dark room with a flashlight,  like roaches scrambling into cracks :grin:


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Original Sensible Seeds Bulk Cannabis Seeds   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Scripps developing vaccine for cocaine addicts veggieM 2,077 5 03/08/15 06:09 PM
by hueristicks
* New Scientist - Psychedelic medicine: Mind bending, health giving ekomstop 3,314 1 02/25/05 03:54 AM
by stefan
* When slime is not so thick Joshua 1,151 1 04/20/04 02:39 PM
by Randolph_Carter
* Marijuana may benefit epileptics, scientists say daba 1,752 2 04/18/20 07:49 PM
by meepins
* Scientists May Use Drugs to Stop Addiction KingOftheThing 2,225 2 09/01/04 10:28 PM
by KingOftheThing
* U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System, Hi Big Brother Lana 1,536 1 07/03/03 04:05 AM
by Joshua
* Post deleted by Administrator Alien 4,444 9 09/11/03 02:27 PM
by Seuss
* Scientists Discover Oldest Culturable Fungi (India) veggieM 1,160 0 06/09/05 12:28 AM
by veggie

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
1,104 topic views. 0 members, 3 guests and 2 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.026 seconds spending 0.007 seconds on 14 queries.