Saturday, July 10, 2010

INSIDE THE RUINED REACTOR, MUSHROOMS EAT RADIATION













A goodly portion of yesterday’s post was devoted to the strangeness of mushrooms, and while I was preparing it, I stumbled across this item. Admittedly it is a couple of years old, but I hadn’t heard it before and I was very taken with how our fungoid siblings can seemingly survive just about anything and even turn it to their advantage.

“Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AEC) have found evidence that certain fungi possess another talent beyond their ability to decompose matter: the capacity to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth. Detailing the research in Public Library of Science ONE, AEC's Arturo Casadevall said his interest was piqued five years ago when he read about how a robot sent into the still-highly-radioactive Chernobyl reactor had returned with samples of black, melanin-rich fungi that were growing on the ruined reactor's walls. "I found that very interesting and began discussing with colleagues whether these fungi might be using the radiation emissions as an energy source," explained Casadevall.” Click here for more.

Click here for the Last Poets and Pharoah Sanders (without even a tenuous connection to fungi)

The secret word is Roentgen

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