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Comment by nelsondev | Hacker News Reader

Fungal mycelial networks can form an underground network capable of transmitting electricity from plant to plant.

I wonder if we tune into just the right frequency plants are already using for communication, we can send more “grow, please” signals.

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Once upon a time I had a hobby growing mushrooms of various types. One day I tried an experiment; I placed little bags populated with oyster mushrooms at various distances from my Wi-Fi hub, a bag about each 15cm or so. After the expected grow time, I had successful growth at the farthest distance of perhaps 2m. However, up close to the base station, all of the bags within 1m or so showed no growth whatsoever. Most notably, there was no contamination, no mold that was visible, and none of the desired oyster mushroom growth. All the bags within one meter were basically sterilized.

So there is certainly a way to say "do not grow". If anyone works out the opposite encoding, I am sure there will be a lot of interested parties who would like to speed up their growth processes.

A huge thousand meter apple tree powered by a nuclear reactor that keeps saying grow more, single handedly producing the country's yearly apple intake.

https://i.imgur.com/vhEgtfc.png

Ha! What’s the terminal velocity of an apple? Sounds like weaponized fruit to me

This makes no sense whatsoever. What possible mechanism do you propose for the fungi to detect and act on such low-power microwave emissions?

My first thought goes to heat from the router, not microwaves. Or maybe they get disturbed more often by someone fiddling with the router.

Also possible that the experiment was just poorly designed, and the results poorly interpreted.

Light would vs also need to be controlled. I certainly don’t do so well next to blue leds.

I had a similar thought, something like varying levels of ambient humidity closer to the washroom. The experiment needs to be repeated in more controlled conditions. Surprised to see the HN crowd taking this obvious pseudoscience at face value.

experiments are not pseudoscience; we teach kids science via science fair projects doing very similar types of experiments.

Pseudoscience is generally when you have an explanation for something but no evidence, and generalize that theory to explain too much

No, experimenting is not pseudoscience, but taking a single flawed experiment communicated anecdotally with no mention of setup or control and then moving into discussion about the "results" as if it was performed in any way reproducibly is pseudoscience. It presents itself as science but when you pick it apart it's actually lacking many mainstays of what we'd call scientific methodology.

It's not necessarily false, it's just less rigorous.

So we can call it light science. Or amateur science?

People shouldn't be discouraged from practicing science.

Or we could call it pseudoscience? The rigour is what makes it science. Maybe it's false, maybe it's not, but right now we can only speculate.

I'm not discouraging anyone; in fact, I'm encouraging repeating the experiment with more rigour, that is calling for more science.

I'm surprised to see experimentation being dismissed so readily.

Calling for more rigorous experimentation is not a dismissal of experimentation. It's healthy to be critical about experimental methodologies and to call for more rigour before conclusions are drawn.

There have been several experiments that have showed similar findings, and I looked through half a dozen or so and didn’t find any that showed otherwise. Here’s one that you can browse:

https://www.eurekaselect.com/article/75099

Interference with bioelectricity signalling which too is very low power, why not? At 15cm distance there could be stronger near-field effects.

Reminds me of a story I heard about a microwave (?) Link on a rural hill somewhere in NZ that requires switching off when techs go to site because it transmits over the road. Cows have to be fenced out of the area in front of it because it damages them, but no grass grows in a cone infront of it anyway.

Can't remember if a uni mate told me that or John Sullivan the telecoms lead of the Auckland skytower construction.

There is a Swiss startup which is doing something like this. They have created a plant sensor that taps into the electrical signals of plants, and use AI to develop an understanding of plant communication. The use case seems to be early diagnosis of stress rather than manipulation of plants, but who knows some day the same understanding can be used to 'control' plants: https://vivent.ch/

Is there nonlinearity due to the observer effect in this system?

From how many meters away can a human walking in a forest be detected with such an organic signal network?

FWIU mycorrhizae networks all broadcast on the same channel? Is it full duplex; are they transmitting and receiving simulatenously?

We already throw like 1/3rd of what we grow, and most of it is a fraction of the quality it used to be. I don't think making more of that faster is a problem to solve

Making more food on less land definitely is.

I think we've already cracked the code on intra-plant communication for growth which is conducted by hormones like Indole-3-acetic acid and the other auxins. I guess it isn't impossible that manipulation of action potentials could augment this.

Or perhaps we could tune in and learn to communicate with the plants.

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