This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins. They say you can catch

more flies with honey than with vinegar. But what if you had access to a remote-controlled

carnivorous plant? Because researchers have engineered a bioinspired system, an artificial

neuron, if you will, that can trigger the snap of a Venus flytrap.

Hi, my name is Simone Fabiano, an associate professor at Linköping University in Sweden.

Fabiano designed the trap springing device using nerve cells as a kind of biobased blueprint.

The way our biological neurons work is that they integrate information from different input

over time, perform computation, and communicate the results to other neurons by a means of voltage

passes. Now, standard silicone-based systems can also deliver electrical pulses, but if you

want a couple of them with something living to produce bionic prosthetics or engineer any kind

of brain-machine interface, well, they suffer from several limitations. Such as rigidity, poor

biocompatibility, complex circuits, structures, and operation mechanisms that are fundamentally

different from those of biological systems. To smooth biological integration, Fabiano

built his system from polymers that conduct both electrons, like everyday electronics and ions,

which is how neurons get things done. It's the ions that enable communication between biological

and artificial neurons. Each part of the artificial neuron, which the researchers describe in the

journal Nature, has a direct counterpart in its biological role model. We have an input terminal

they act as the biological neurons, then, right? That dendrite collects the incoming electrical

signals and sends them to a capacitor, which, like a neuronal cell body, integrates the information.

Then, once the voltage reaches a specific threshold, a pulse is fired along organic amplifiers

that mimic a nerve cell axon. We use the ionic concentration-dependent switching

characteristics of our transistors to modulate the frequency of spiking, which is to a large extent

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