EarthTalk is an independent research project measuring electrical activity in living fungal networks, and a public record of what that measurement can and cannot support.
It is one person with ordinary hardware, working on a question that has stayed open for fifty years. There is no institution behind it.
Fungi produce measurable electrical activity along their hyphae. Laboratories have been recording it since the 1970s and the phenomenon itself is not disputed. What remains unsettled is what the activity corresponds to: whether it reflects the state of the organism, and whether it varies with conditions in a way that could be read from outside.
The project is set up around that last question, because electrical recordings in substrate are easy to contaminate. Temperature cycles, electrode drift, and differences between amplifiers all produce structure that looks biological, and I have generated several of those myself and believed them for a while. I wanted to know how much survives when you assume the artifact first.
Fungi held my attention for years before I had any way to act on it. What made it tractable was how cheap the measurement turned out to be: a microcontroller, an amplifier, and a pair of needles in a block of substrate will record something. Whether what it records is biology is what this site tries to find out.
These practices make the work checkable, though not necessarily correct. Without peer review, that is the most an independent project can offer.
The direction I am working toward is whether electrical measurement can say something useful about the biological state of soil: whether the living part of it is functioning, including non-invasive detection of mycorrhizal colonization in the field. Soil chemistry is not the target, because it is already measurable.
That is a hypothesis rather than a plan. It rests on several things that are not established, and most of this site is the record of finding out where it fails. If the measurement turns out not to support it, that will be published here in the same form as everything else.
These measurements support only narrow conclusions.
If the signal proves separable from moisture, salinity and temperature, the next step is a field method to check whether mycorrhizal inoculants have actually colonized a crop's roots, without digging up and staining samples. Further out, repeated readings across many sites could show how soil biology changes over time. None of this is possible yet; it depends on the experiments logged here.
I would like to hear from anyone running fungal blocks, building instrumentation, or analysing signals of this kind. I especially want to hear from you if you tried something described in the protocols and it did not work, or if it worked and gave a different answer. Negative and contradictory results are published here with attribution.
Moshe Lokshin, an entrepreneur based in Canada. I have built and sold companies in media, software, and real estate. I now work on this full time.
The project is self-funded. Nothing here is produced under a grant, a commercial agreement, or an institutional affiliation. I have a commercial interest in whether this line of measurement works. Keep that in mind when reading anything on this site. It is also part of why the negative results are published alongside the rest.