"Professor Richard Fortey delves into the fascinating and normally hidden kingdom of fungi. From their spectacular birth, through their secretive underground life to their final explosive death, Richard reveals a remarkable world that few of us understand or even realise exists - yet all life on earth depends on it.
In a specially built mushroom lab, with the help of mycologist Dr Patrick Hickey and some state-of-the-art technology, Richard brings to life the secret world of mushrooms as never seen before and reveals the spectacular abilities of fungi to break down waste and sustain new plant life, keeping our planet alive.
Beyond the lab, Richard travels across Britain and beyond to show us the biggest, fastest and most deadly organisms on the planet - all of them fungi. He reveals their almost magical powers that have world-changing potential - opening up new frontiers in science, medicine and technology."
Fantastic Fungi, directed by Louie Schwartzberg, is a consciousness-shifting film that takes us on an immersive journey through time and scale into the magical earth beneath our feet, an underground network that can heal and save our planet. Through the eyes of renowned scientists and mycologists like Paul Stamets, best-selling authors Michael Pollan, Eugenia Bone, Andrew Weil and others, we become aware of the beauty, intelligence and solutions the fungi kingdom offers us in response to some of our most pressing medical, therapeutic, and environmental challenges.
> The mushroom is an ideal food...Low in fats, sugars and calories...
It's funny to see "low calorie" as a positive for an ideal food. From the perspective of getting people enough food to live, things like grains, corn/maize and potatoes are "ideal" foods because they can cheaply get us a significant portion of our needed calories.
Ha! I came here to say the same thing. How the world has changed from 99% of our existence when humans were basically hungry all the time and calorie-density was an asset not a liability!
This is not really the case though. Humans in the past, even hunter-foragers (so therefore humans for most of human history) typically had an abundance of food and didn't have to work hard for it. We just destroyed all the food-rich ecosystems that used to sustain us before agriculture became widespread.
An interesting company in this space is LifeMine Therapeutics. My understanding is that they have a large collection of fungi genomes. They apply bioinformatics techniques to search for genes encoding metabolic pathways that produce biologically active molecules. Fungi metabolism produces some truly wild chemicals, which, as the article mentions, include some of the most important medicines we have ever discovered. Penicillin is the classic example.
Personally, I was totally enthralled learning about this approach. Using artificial brains to scour the life essence of fungi to discover ancient, mysterious compounds that heal disease. It's like a scifi/fantasy subplot that gets cut because it sounds strained.
The article states that a form of intelligence (without brain or neurons) emerges from fungi networks:
"Forests, grasslands and woodlands are not landscapes of individual trees competing with one another for survival. They are interconnected ecosystems that have formed over millions of years and their participants are able to negotiate, cooperate, trade, steal and compromise – all in the absence of a brain. Fungi connect them all."
"Fungi have a series of nerve nets throughout the mycelia via which chemicals can travel, similar to our neural transmitters. These chemical signals trigger responses that are programmed into their DNA, a type of intelligence that, in many cases, rivals the human brain in its degree of intricacy, complexity and connections."
"Mycorrhizal networks are structured the same way as neural networks in the brain"
"Oldest and largest trees have the most mycorrhizal connections. They are social creatures that support the rest of the network by feeding seedlings and injured or shaded trees, warning others of attacks and transferring their nutrients to neighbouring plants before dying."
I'm looking forward to what kind of impact mushroom leather will have if it becomes competitive with animal leather in price, availability, and durability. I wonder if it can replace animal leather for leatherworking eventually? Could you cobble a decent pair of hiking boots with it?
It's an interesting development, but it doesn't look like it really has the qualities leather has (thickness and strength in particular) — it looks more like an alternative for various fabrics. I've seen it mentioned a few times before, but it seems to be a bit stuck on a level of development where the resulting material is nice to use for some proof of concept arts and crafts, but nowhere near a replacement for animal leather. Is SCOBY a dead end or is there more to be expected?
Mycelium leather meanwhile seems quite ahead of the game:
Of course, there is a (very) commercial side there that adds a veneer of professionalism, and the brands involved may see this mostly as a very marketable and useful greenwashing effort. Still looks impressive though.
(Damn that website's asinine scroll hijacking though! Whoever though that was good idea!? I can't get it to scroll reliably at all!)
Presumably they'd have to treat the mycelium in some way but it would be cool if they didn't have to as mycelium can grow together and form a single organism. That would mean after you built your wall out of bricks, it would just turn into a solid wall after all the bricks grew together. Probably wouldn't work in practice but fun in theory.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible to create an intentional environment where it could grow into any shape you want, of just about any human-scale size. Pehraps it would involve some carefully setup (and periodically adjusted) arrangement of lighting, climate control, and shade control.
Interesting, I've never heard of this. Do you have any links or references to teams testing out these biological innovations for the construction space? I'd like to learn more.
It's worth noting that fungi aren't fungible in the way that blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are, which is a real misfeature.
For example, you can't leverage fungi to build a blockchain-based English language dictionary and then leverage that to rename "fungi" to avoid confusion for blockchain investors. You can do that with blockchain, and should.
Also IIRC market cap is smaller.
tldr; the fact that "legacy fiat funguses" are inferior to blockchain is proved by leveraging trustless transactions of the blockchain.
I tried microdosing psylo regulary for 2 years it gave me a lot of improvement on my mental health, now I don't consume it anymore, I just can't feel the need to, like if I was cured.
humorous to see a mushroom fan invited to a formal talk among scientists.. He 'recently moved jobs' and 'has something really big' coming up.. when the science was flowing, his part kept referring to consciousness itself, and seeing the disconnectedness of all organisms.. no mention of the specific question ! It was obvious to me that he was invited to bring breadth to the (environmental) science talk.. but I found it funny to see his "trippy" inputs so bluntly disjoint from the content of the actual questions.
to be complete, I believe that pure consciousness, and multi-organism biological models, are essential myself. It was funny to me to see it included in a clumsy way.. nervous-humor perhaps..
The Magic of Mushrooms: (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041m6fh)
"Professor Richard Fortey delves into the fascinating and normally hidden kingdom of fungi. From their spectacular birth, through their secretive underground life to their final explosive death, Richard reveals a remarkable world that few of us understand or even realise exists - yet all life on earth depends on it.
In a specially built mushroom lab, with the help of mycologist Dr Patrick Hickey and some state-of-the-art technology, Richard brings to life the secret world of mushrooms as never seen before and reveals the spectacular abilities of fungi to break down waste and sustain new plant life, keeping our planet alive.
Beyond the lab, Richard travels across Britain and beyond to show us the biggest, fastest and most deadly organisms on the planet - all of them fungi. He reveals their almost magical powers that have world-changing potential - opening up new frontiers in science, medicine and technology."