virovac:

aerylon:

beachgirlnikita:

rewind-on-purpose:

This is actually pretty exciting. They’ve found a way to turn plastic into food.

Mushrooms are such amazing things. Most are decomposers, meaning they break stuff down into its original components. Some break down dead wood, or animals, others can break down toxic waste, and apparently this one can break down plastic. How cool is that?

It’s going to take a LOT of shrooms to break down all the plastic waste. Re-inventing packaging so that less waste is created to begin with would make a bigger difference.

Alternative packaging, and much less of it, is ideal.  The real reason this is exciting news is that its real-time evolution.  

Once upon a time, there were no biological elements to break down deceased biological elements.  When leaves, trees, animals, and insects fell to the ground - they stayed there and just got covered by more fallen biomass.  Hard to believe, but at the time there were no fungi to break them down and recycle them.  

Over time, this stuff piled up like the detritus in a teenager’s bedroom.  It got thicker and denser, and some times turned to mush. But without a biological Mom to clean it out - it stayed there.  Eventually, this biomass became coal (solid) and oil (mush).  This kept up for millions of years before the first fungi evolved and began making use of the previously unused resources.  Like humans, it took Planet Earth a long while to figure out that recycling needed to be a real thing.

Unfortunately, these new recyclers couldn’t access the previously fallen mass due to it being covered under millions of years of geological change.  But humans (ah, humans!), we were very helpful in turning it all over like a giant, polluting compost pile, and making it available to our fungi Moms.  And now that its been exposed fungi!moms are evolving ways to make use of it, which is very exciting.  

Now all we need to do is turn over those giant landfills we have everywhere and give the new fungi access to all the buried waste so they can do their thing.  

(I can’t possibly be the only one see the grand-scale, cyclical irony here…)

And all that oil and coal lying around probably led to contributing to phase 2 of the mass extinction known as The Great Dying.

There is evidence for one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.[8][11][12][13] Suggested mechanisms for the latter include one or more large meteor impact events, massive volcanism such as that of the Siberian Traps, and the ensuing coal or gas fires and explosions,[14] and a runaway greenhouse effect triggered by sudden release of methane from the sea floor due to methane clathrate dissociation according to the clathrate gun hypothesis or methane-producing microbes known as methanogens.[15]

Also note this does not help the ocean, which isn’t mushroom friendly