TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

3720 readers

584 users here now

/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!

Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.

~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.

~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.

~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.

~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.

~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.

~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.

~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'

~ **8. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.

Fun will now commence.

Sister Communities:

[email protected]

Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!

Honorary Badbitch:

@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.

Creator Resources:

Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)

Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)

founded 10 months ago

MODERATORS

Spore Drive incoming? (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 2 months ago by negativenull to c/tenforward

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17039986

Engineers gave a mushroom a robot body and let it run wild

Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells.

But given a chance, what might this web of impulses do if granted a moment of freedom?

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University in the US and the University of Florence in Italy took steps to find out, putting 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.

Through a series of experiments, the researchers showed it was possible to use the mushroom's electrophysiological activity as a means of translating environmental cues into directives, which could, in turn, be used to drive a mechanical device's movements.

"By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment," says senior researcher Rob Shepherd, a materials scientist at Cornell.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] FlyingSquid 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

There is something about the idea of fungus given that sort of agency that I find incredibly disturbing.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA 2 points 2 months ago

So humans did this a few years ago and I'm still not sure it was a good idea. Cool tho.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I really hate to break this to you, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

[–] FlyingSquid 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that’s not really the same thing. That’s more following basic programming: get the ant to the top of the leaf. This feels different to me.

Not that cordyceps isn’t also creepy…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The idea that it mind controls the ant into its death is creepy as fuck to me. It’s this kind of thing that, if it ever made the jump to infecting humans, would probably wipe out the species.

[–] FlyingSquid 4 points 2 months ago

Sure, but now imagine it can run toward you in order to infect you.