{"id":821394,"date":"2026-07-23T18:54:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T18:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/821394\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T18:54:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T18:54:11","slug":"scientists-listened-to-moss-for-a-week-and-found-strange-electrical-pulses-moving-through-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/821394\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Listened to Moss for a Week and Found Strange Electrical Pulses Moving Through It"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Credit: Pexels<\/p>\n

Moss is alive but doesn\u2019t look like much. It has no nerves, no brain, and no obvious way to communicate. Yet when researchers listened for a week, it pulsed with electricity.<\/p>\n

In a seven-day experiment, common rough-stalked feather moss produced electrical spikes and slow-moving voltage waves that appeared to travel across its cushion. <\/p>\n

The finding does not turn moss into a thinking organism. But it suggests that one of the planet\u2019s simplest plants may coordinate activity over distance\u2014a possibility that could shape future living sensors, moss-covered building materials, and biological computers grown from living tissue.<\/p>\n

A Week Inside a Moss Cushion<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>(a) Scheme depicting B. rutabulum\u00a0on a wet substrate with two pairs of electrodes. (b) A photograph of the moss and electrode cables. (c) Overview of the electrical activity. Recordings from each pair of differential electrodes are represented by a unique colour. Credit: Royal Society Open Science<\/p>\n

Mosses are among the oldest plants in the fossil record. This is even obvious from their lack of the plumbing that lets trees and flowers move water through stems and roots. Their leaf-like structures can be only one cell thick, and a moss cushion is often a crowd of tiny, closely packed shoots rather than one large plant.<\/p>\n

That makes the new study unusually intriguing. Without veins, true roots, or a nervous system, the moss still showed electrical patterns that appeared to travel.<\/p>\n

The experiment was led by Andy Adamatzky, a computer scientist at the University of the West of England who studies unconventional computing\u2014systems that process signals without silicon chips or brains. He has investigated information-like behavior in slime molds, fungal networks, and other living materials<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For this study, he turned to common rough-stalked feather moss, or Brachythecium rutabulum<\/a>. Adamatzky collected moss cushions from North Somerset in southwest England, placed them on a wet surface inside a transparent, humid container under dim light, and inserted tiny needle electrodes into the green mats.<\/p>\n

For 178 hours\u2014a little more than seven days\u2014eight pairs of electrodes spaced about one to two centimeters apart recorded voltage changes. By the end, the setup had produced more than 5 million measurements.<\/p>\n

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Those events came in several forms. Some were fast spikes. Others were slower rhythmic changes. Still others were very slow voltage waves that unfolded over hours. In plain terms, voltage is a measure of electrical difference between two points; a spike is a sudden jump in that signal.<\/p>\n

The fastest waves moved at about 0.2 millimeters per second. Intermediate waves moved at about 0.02 millimeters per second. The slowest crept along at less than 0.005 millimeters per second.<\/p>\n

A Very Slow Kind of Network<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>B. rutabulum. Credit: Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

The moss did not behave like a brain, and the study does not show that it thinks. The electrical events were far slower than nerve signals in animals.<\/p>\n

But the patterns were not simple background noise either. The recordings showed spike trains, long stretches of higher and lower activity, slow baseline shifts, and signals that appeared at one electrode before appearing at another.<\/p>\n

\u201cElectrical activity is not spatially static; it propagates at multiple speeds and time scales,\u201d Adamatzky wrote.<\/p>\n

That suggests the moss cushion may act as a distributed system, with many small living parts linked through electrical, chemical, or water-based processes. The paper proposes that moss could someday integrate into biohybrid sensors\u2014devices that combine living tissue with electronics\u2014or into living facades that detect changes in buildings and their environment.<\/p>\n

The Caution Behind the Wonder<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>B. rutabulum close-up. Credit: Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

The study also leaves important questions open.<\/p>\n

There were no negative control recordings from dead moss or an inert wet surface. Temperature and humidity were not continuously monitored. The moss came from nature, not a carefully standardized lab culture. Electrode drift, changing moisture, or contact between the needles and tissue could have altered some of the slower signals.<\/p>\n

Adamatzky acknowledges that the interpretation remains provisional. Future experiments will need controls, monitored environments, and deliberate stimuli\u2014light, heat, chemicals or touch\u2014to show how much of the signal truly comes from the moss and what information, if any, it carries.<\/p>\n

For now, the work is best read as a starting point, a measurable electrical behavior to test, and a reason to take moss seriously as a possible material for living sensors.<\/p>\n

The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Pexels Moss is alive but doesn\u2019t look like much. It has no nerves, no brain, and no…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":821395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[287559,287560,49,48,287561,37500,10979,287562,66],"class_list":["post-821394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-brachythecium-rutabulum","tag-bryophytes","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-living-materials","tag-moss","tag-plant-biology","tag-plant-communication","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}