Mycelium skins function as sustainable substrates for high-performance electronic devices and batteries for a green future.
Electronic devices are irrevocably integrated into our lives. Yet, their limited lifetime and often improvident disposal demands sustainable concepts to realize a green electronic future. Research must shift its focus on substituting nondegradable and difficult-to-recycle materials to allow either biodegradation or facile recycling of electronic devices. Here, we demonstrate a concept for growth and processing of fungal mycelium skins as biodegradable substrate material for sustainable electronics. The skins allow common electronic processing techniques including physical vapor deposition and laser patterning for electronic traces with conductivities as high as 9.75 ± 1.44 × 104 S cm−1. The conformal and flexible electronic mycelium skins withstand more than 2000 bending cycles and can be folded several times with only moderate resistance increase. We demonstrate mycelium batteries with capacities as high as ~3.8 mAh cm−2 used to power autonomous sensing devices including a Bluetooth module and humidity and proximity sensor.
Another "take any junk, burn it to carbon, carbon is conductor and battery" work. Scientifically speaking, more junk. All the CVD/ALD stuff and lithography processes are where toxic waste comes in - silicon wafers are not harmful for environment, battery fluids and doping elements are.
Live mycelium computing is a cool concept though, I wish more work was done there. I'm pretty sure 3d mycelial structures could beat chatgpt hardware in performance and store carbon instead of just burning it for power and datacenter cooling.