Mycelia could form the architecture of future computer brain interfaces

Wetware: the concept of merging hardware and software with living tissue. It has been science-fiction fodder for decades. We've seen it in TV shows like Star Trek with the blind character Geordi La Forge's visor that allows him to see and in video games like the Deus Ex franchise, where all sorts of electronics can be fused to those who can afford it.

Much of science fiction is just an imaginative extension of scientific reality -- wetware is nothing new. Neural interfaces and other devices have been in development for decades. Some of them even work to an extent. A primary obstacle has been getting solid-state components to communicate with organic material. The two are so dissimilar it's challenging to create a way to translate one to the other, but what if electronics were made from organic matter?

That's what researchers at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory (UCL) at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) want to discover. The scientists there have developed a mushroom computer.

Source: Techspot, by Cal Jeffrey