A Smartwatch That Stops Working if You Don’t Feed it
Don’t feel guilty if you’ve ever killed a Tamagotchi; caring for a digital creature is hard when there’s no real world consequences. To increase the stakes, researchers from the University of Chicago built a smartwatch with a real living creature inside it: a physarum polycephalum slime mold. The watch can only draw power if the mold is kept alive and well through regular feedings, as the mold itself completes the watch’s circuit. Ignore it and the slime dies, as does the smartwatch.
