For nearly a century, our digital world has been built on silicon—chips, transistors, and circuits etched into wafers that power smartphones, satellites, and supercomputers. But as artificial intelligence pushes computation to its physical and energy limits, scientists are daring to imagine something radically different: computers made not of metal, but of life itself.
At Rice University in Texas, researchers are pioneering a bold new field called biocomputing, with bacterial cells as the foundation. Funded by a $1.99 million National Science Foundation grant, their project treats each bacterial cell as a tiny processor. Microbes are natural information handlers. They sense, respond, and adapt to their environments in ways that resemble computational logic. The question now is whether they can be linked into vast biological networks that think, learn, and evolve.
Continue reading… “The Dawn of Living Computers: How Bacteria Could Outthink Silicon”
