This seems like it's constrained to produce a trivial amount of energy. There is no way it's a practical source of power to reduce carbon emissions. Let's say we drop an 80kg person onto this floor and they deform it half a centimeter. That's 9.80 N/kg * 80 kg * .5 cm = 3.92 joules. A AA battery has 14,000 joules in it, which means you'd have to do that 3,571 times generate the equivalent energy.
The paper's abstract gives 0.87 volts * 13.3 nA =
1.15E-8 joules per second. That's not exactly going to make a dent in our power grid.
One paper I found [2] says you could get about 5J per step from walking on level ground, but that's still the same order of magnitude as my initial estimate and nowhere near a practical power generation technology.
You’re not wrong, but I think your point is missing the most interesting aspect of the article. Which is fair, I don’t think this article was written very well. The thing that stands out to me the most is the realization that mycelial networks generate electricity at all, just from applied pressure.
The article stated that this is the piezoelectric effect, which by definition is a very minuscule amount of electricity. I can’t imagine anyone is seriously considering this effect could be tapped reduce carbon emissions. They suggested if more buildings were constructed from wood that might reduce carbon, but it’s sort of a tangent to what should have been the headliner if you ask me :)
The fact that the fungus is generating an electric charge, albeit very small seems incredible to me! Add it to the list of incredible things fungus and mushrooms are capable of, and the important role they play in our environment. Is no surprise the show ‘Star Trek Discovery’ chose a ‘mycelial network’ as the ships basis for teleporting around the universe.
I got the impression, both from this article and the original (here: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/11/eabd9138) that the electricity wasn't generated by the fungus, but instead the increased compressibility of the wood after being rotted enhanced its pre-existing piezoelectric properties. The original article does mention "mitigation of climate change" as a possible application, by the way.
I heard that squeezing "possibly related to climate change" somewhere in academic work increases chances of getting grant money nowadays, could it be it's the only reason why this phrase is there in this case?
Oh dang, Yeah I think you’re right! Maybe I got to excited for the fungus part from my own bias, maybe I’ve been watching to much Star Trek haha :)
So it’s the resulting structure of the wood, not the mycelium itself. Thanks for setting me straight.
It’s a little unclear how, or what types of devices could be powered by this, but they would be very low power. The biggest is mitigation to climate change come from selecting wood as the primary building material, versus steel which produces a lot of greenhouse gas.
The energy 'created' (transformed) is still generated by the human by effectively burning carbohydrates/fats/etc. Might as well create a tiny alternator, spin it by hand and be done with. Alternatively, attach magnets/coils to gym equipment and there you go. If you continue further, no need for springs and weights at all - make all gym equipment with NdFeB and copper instead - 'free' energy.
Maybe the innovation is designing devices that require orders of magnitude less energy, and then meeting in the middle with low output energy sources like solar panels, etc.
At that point, we just make less batteries and solar panels and call it a day. An order of magnitude less energy consumption means we basically already have the necessary renewables and nuclear installed as is, job done.
All of these "clever" energy recovery schemes are inherently stupid, because you'd almost always be better off just making the original system more efficient rather than recovering some negligible fraction of its losses.
> There is no way it's a practical source of power to reduce carbon emissions.
Even if it were, the fungi probably release a couple more orders of magnitude more CO2 than saved by this generation mechanism.
Common fallacy is anything "natural" is a carbon reduction. Not always true. A biker on a meat-based diet releases more CO2 per kilometer than a Prius. [1]
The idea of generating energy from people is actually kind of interesting because it's something that we already do at the gym. We have all these weights and machines to have people expend as much energy as they can, but don't capture it.
Now I'm sure the amount of energy expended at a gym is fairly trivial, but if we can attach a $5 generator to every exercise bike, rowing machine, stair machine, etc. it could potentially be profitable.
Not in the exact same spot as a usable building. Not a big one anyway. I guess it could conceivably be more effective to just put a vertical windmill on the roof.
This is a pretty fun idea to think about. Does the energy from the animal that walks on the wood cost the animal extra energy or does the energy come from the efficiency loss from walking (whatever that means?)?
Presumably the energy that would normally go into deforming the wood is converted to electricity. The wood would spring back less or be less warm or make less sound, etc.
Drop a ball, slow-mo camera to measure bounce, mic to measure sound, infrared to measure heat....BUT the energy amounts were talking about are very small.
It seems like this would be easier to apply in measuring stresses in wood beams and building parts than it would be to apply in generating electricity.
you do know you can measure energy in electron volts. Using the standard volts would need to have current given and time to transform to energy, though.
Why do fungi generate electricity after deformation?
Or asked differently, what information is encoded in that electrical pulse? Presumably, evolutionarily, fungi developed transmitting information via mycelium to other connected fungi. But why are fungi letting connected fungi know, “hey, I got stepped on!” ?
There need not be any evolutionary advantage to this particular property of mycelium, as long as its structure provides other evolutionary benefits. Such as a medium to transmit nutrients. In other words, it could be just a side-effect of something useful.
From reading the article, I get the sense that the piezoelectric effect in the wood itself is what is generating the electricity. So I think the role of the fungi is just to weaken the wood so that it's soft enough to compress more easily.
Would connecting several together then still produce more current? Because I'd assume that all the pieces of infected wood would have to be moving at the same time to generate friction.
> "Moreover, we were able to significantly increase the maximum output current (≈ 205 nA) by connecting 30 wood sponges in parallel to each other, making a demonstrator suitable for wooden tables or floors." which is at 0.69V
If someone steps on your foot, the nerves in your foot conduct an electrical signal to your brain for interpretation as pressure, pain, etc. Plants use external chemical signals for similar signaling. Presumably this is similar.
Right, but the point of the pain is to remind conscious me to pull my foot away. But fungi (afaik) aren’t conscious, nor can move, so what’s the evolutionary advantage to this signaling?
It may signal where to invest more effort into decomposing the material (if the pressure degrades the material) or where it wouldn't be a good idea to put effort into sprouting to reproduce (wouldn't make sense to put your reproductive organs in harm's way).
I am kind of partial to the pan-psychic notion of all plants and animals who are living having something that could resemble consciousness or at least an experience of existing. It may not resemble the part of our consciousness that forms words and likes to project an ego into the world but perhaps the experiences we have while dreaming or non-verbally perceiving. I suspect that the experience of being a mycelium would be very alien to anything we can easily imagine. But this whole concept is best explored in science-fiction for now.
The idea that fungi would have rudimentary communication pathways isn't really that insane. That doesn't necessarily make it true, but it always strikes me as odd when people talk about plants, fungi and other non-animal life as if it wasn't life at all.
The Xenofungus from the video game Alpha Centauri comes to mind.
Depends on your definition of conscious, I suppose. Fungi can definitely move, just not via locomotion - fungi expand through mycelial networks and reproduction.
Who knows what the specific function is, maybe specific species are sensitive to the specific pressure of another species required for reproduction. In the plant example, they often use chemical signaling to repel predators (and note that plants are also "not conscious", and most are way less mobile than fungi).
One thing that surprised me recently was the electricity released by tearing and pulling off tape. I was trying to make some direct exposures onto photographic paper inside a camera obscura. Inside the very dark room I could see bursts static electricity every time I tore off a bit of tape. And when I went to remove some double sided tape from the back of photo paper, it also lit up, hopefully not leaving some strips on my exposure.
Not really related to fungi, but maybe about as curiously surprising.
A lot of folks are poo-pooing this, and maybe rightfully so, but you have to admit this is pretty damn cool. Besides the narrow-framed application it's interesting that it was even discovered.
The article says this rotted wood could be used as a building material but isn't the very rotting that makes the piezoelectric effect more efficient also counterproductive to strong building materials?
Layers of subflooring don't all need to be structural, but they do need to tolerate heavy foot traffic, plus occasional heavy items rolling on dollys. The more give it has, the more it has to be able to return to its original state, which rotted wood isnt usually great at.
"Moreover, we were able to significantly increase
the maximum output current (≈ 205 nA) by connecting 30 wood sponges in parallel to each
other, making a demonstrator suitable for wooden tables or floors." which is at 0.69V
so to get 1A, you will need 150000 (though I doubt it would scale like that) all being stepped on actively. So as a power source? seems unlikely. As a sensor, sure.
If there's a harder surface over it, it'll spread out the pressure over a larger area, meaning the wood as a whole would compress slightly. Not a bad idea.
The paper's abstract gives 0.87 volts * 13.3 nA = 1.15E-8 joules per second. That's not exactly going to make a dent in our power grid.
One paper I found [2] says you could get about 5J per step from walking on level ground, but that's still the same order of magnitude as my initial estimate and nowhere near a practical power generation technology.
[1]: https://www.baldengineer.com/9v-battery-energy-density.html
[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311916.2016.1...