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Cornell Chronicle

Cornell Chronicle

Biohybrid robots controlled by electrical impulses — in mushrooms | Cornell Chronicle

Cornell Chronicle
Summary
Nutrition label

85% Informative

Fungal mycelia can sense chemical and biological signals and respond to multiple inputs.

The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.

The team’s paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots.

Maybe that signal is coming from some kind of stresses. So you’re seeing the physical response, because those signals we can’t visualize, but the robot is making a visualization.” Co-authors include Johnson , Hodge , Jaeseok Kim with the University of Florence, Italy , and undergraduate research assistant Hannah Baghdadi . The research was supported by the National Science Foundation ( NSF ) CROPPS Science and Technology Center ; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture ; and the NSF Signal in Soil program..

VR Score

86

Informative language

85

Neutral language

66

Article tone

semi-formal

Language

English

Language complexity

62

Offensive language

not offensive

Hate speech

not hateful

Attention-grabbing headline

not detected

Known propaganda techniques

not detected

Time-value

long-living

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