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Pandora from Avatar really does exist. And we've designed a device to understand it.

Beneath every field, every forest, every handful of soil — fungi are sending electrical signals. We built the tool to finally capture them.
23 April 2026 by
Chermeux


Remember Avatar ? That luminous network of roots connecting all living things on Pandora—trees, animals, the entire planet communicating through an underground web of light. James Cameron didn't invent that idea. He borrowed it from reality.

Beneath your feet, right now, fungi are doing exactly the same thing. Not with bioluminescent light, but with electrical signals—tiny pulses of voltage flowing through networks of microscopic filaments called mycelium, connecting organisms, sharing information, and reacting to their environment.

Scientists have suspected this for decades. But until recently, no one had a reliable way to measure it. The signal was real, but drowned out by noise, impossible to capture clearly, impossible to replicate from one lab to another.

This is the problem we decided to solve with our partners.


We did the science first

Before building a product, we went back to basics. That work led to a peer-reviewed publication in iScience (Buffi et al., 2025), co-authored with researchers from the University of Neuchâtel, HEIA-FR, ETH Zürich, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Valerio, our co-founder and CTO, is among the authors — he designed the circuit board at the heart of this research. This isn't a product built on assumptions. It's built on published science.


So — what did we actually discover?

Let's keep it simple.

Fungi grow by extending microscopic filaments called hyphae. Over time, these hyphae form a dense interconnected network — the mycelium. Think of it as the fungus's body, but spread out across the soil like a web.

Measuring fungal electrical signals sounds simple. In practice, it's extremely difficult — we're talking microvolts, a million times smaller than a AA battery. At that scale, everything becomes noise.

To confirm the signal was truly biological, we added cycloheximide — a toxic compound that kills fungal growth. The signal collapsed immediately. Then we tried a non-toxic antifungal — the signal persisted, and the fungus showed a visible stress response. The conclusion was clear : the signal reflects the living state of the mycelium in real time.


Why it matters ?
If fungi produce electrical signals that reflect their biological state, those signals are a window into what's happening underground — without disturbing the system.

For researchers, it opens a new field of investigation into how fungal networks communicate. For mushroom growers, it means detecting stress in a culture before it's visible to the eye.


And then what?
In Avatar, the Na'vi could connect directly to Pandora's living network, feeling the forest breathe, listening to every root and every fiber of the ecosystem beneath their feet. This scene will soon no longer be science fiction.

We are currently working to improve our measurement systems, their reproducibility, and their simplicity, in order to create a comprehensive soil sensing platform that offers farmers and researchers precisely that: the ability to connect to the living network beneath their feet and finally understand what the soil has always been trying to tell us.


Link to the publication :      https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)01745-6