Connecting directly to brain cells yields a new breakthrough in energy efficient computing

追加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Mark Hersam's team built artificial neurons, printed them using an aerosol jet printer, the same class of tool that you'd use for printing electronics onto circuit boards.

[00:00:10]And they deposited nanoscale flakes of molybdenum disulfide and graphene onto flexible polymer surfaces. And these little devices produced electrical signals that mimic the full vocabulary of biological neural communication.

[00:00:26]Single spikes, continuous firing, bursting patterns, that's the whole range. And then they put them next to slices of living mouse brain tissue. The biological neurons responded, fired back, treated those synthetic signals as if they came from the organism itself.

[00:00:44]Now, here's the even more clever part.

[00:00:46]Previous researchers working with these inks had a problem. Polymer residue left over from manufacturing messed up the electrical performance, so they'd strip it out. But Hersam's team did the opposite. They partially decomposed it.

[00:01:01]And that created a narrow conductive filament that concentrates current into a tight channel, producing the sudden voltage spike that looks like a neuron firing. They turned a manufacturing flaw into the core mechanism. Now, why does this matter for you? Because the brain runs on roughly 20 watts. Your laptop runs on 65. A data center GPU runs on 700. The brain is five orders of magnitude more energy efficient than digital computing. That's 100,000 times.

[00:01:32]If you can build hardware that biological tissue recognizes and responds to, you're not just making better brain implants, though that's huge for anyone who might one day need a prosthetic that restores hearing or vision or movement. You're opening a path to computing architectures that work like brains work. And the energy math alone on that means the entire intelligence era changes.