Deadly fungus Candida auris was found in nature for the first time. A deadly fungus that seemed to spring up out of nowhere in hospitals has been found in nature for the first time.
Researchers isolated the yeast Candida auris from two sites on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. The discovery suggests that C. auris was an environmental fungus before it was identified as a human pathogen, researchers report online March 16 in mBio. It was a real puzzle as to where C. auris came from when it began appearing in patients and clinics, says Christina Cuomo, who studies fungal pathogen evolution at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and was not involved in the study. “It’s the first clue as to where else it might be.” C. auris emerged as a human pathogen on three continents in the early 2010s. Sign Up For the Latest from Science News Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox The fact that C. auris can thrive inside the human body is unusual.
Secrets of the Fungi Kingdom - Reset.me. The Psychedelic Rush to Become Big Shroom. The psychedelic psilocybe mushroom grows all over the world, sprouting in a hundred different shapes and sizes, in landscapes as disparate as the Australian desert and the wet highlands of Norway.
To make them sprout, all you need is a spore and the right mix of light, moisture and substrate, be it a bag of brown Uncle Ben’s rice or hay and animal shit spread gently across a barn floor. No matter the soil, it’s a humble beginning for a pretty product, featuring round caps cast in golden ombré and slender stems that look downright elegant.
We’ll never know the identity of the man or woman who first spotted these mushrooms and accidentally found God after a taste. All we know is that humans have loved psilocybin for more than 6,000 years. That love only seems to have intensified in the last century. Last year, psychedelic mushrooms were decriminalized in Denver, Oakland and Santa Cruz, California. Artificial intelligence - Super-intelligent fungus? My concern would be the energy required to maintain sentience.
The human brain is a calorie hog, taking 20% of the body's energy supply. Fungi, making a living by decomposing stuff, survive on much less energy than any mammal, and they don't have access to the 25 watts or so that the human brain needs. (This, by the way, is an incredible adaption. Compare this to the rating of your computer) Distributed intelligence makes thinking slow. Of course these problems can be handwaved away. Could this fungus evolve-- tricky. The fungus needs to be able to act in someway. Spore's the pity: how Fantastic Fungi flags up man's abuse of nature. Watching the anemone stinkhorn sprout from the soil is a wondrous – and terrifying – thing.
Emerging from a pod that looks like a truffle, the mushroom unfurls half a dozen arms, all a throbbing scarlet, like a collection of tongues. Each of these is forked and, across their stems, a series of black sticky lumps pop up like rotting barbecue. It’s supposed to smell something awful too. The fungus that’s worth $900 billion a year. From the dawn of history, human civilizations have prospered through partnership with the simple single-cell fungus we call yeast.
It transforms sugars into alcohol, puffs up bread dough with bubbles of carbon dioxide, and is used to produce an assortment of fermented foods. It has become the workhorse of modern biotechnology as the source of life-saving medicines and industrial chemicals. And, most recently, the manufacture of ethanol as a biofuel from corn and sugarcane has launched yeast onto the frontline of our efforts to slow climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Our bond with yeast probably began tens of thousands of years ago, with the unconscious use of the fungus to brew palm wine. This practice spread as Homo sapiens migrated from the Rift Valley and our unusual symbiosis with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the sugar fungus) deepened and diversified. One way to measure the importance of yeast is to evaluate its vast economic impact.
'Plastic-eating' fungus discovered in Islamabad garbage dump - Pakistan - DAWN.COM. Pakistani and Chinese researchers have discovered a fungus which feeds on plastic in a rubbish dump in Islamabad.
A study titled "Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Aspergillus tubingensis", authored by nine researchers from Pakistan and China ─ who stress the need for "new, safer and more effective ways to degrade waste plastic" ─ found that the fungus aspergillus tubingensis can break down non-biodegradable plastic in weeks by secreting enzymes which pull apart individual molecules. Lead author of the study, Dr Sehroon Khan from the World Agroforestry Centre/Kunming Institute of Biology, was quoted by the World Agroforestry Centre as saying that her team had been looking for ways to degrade waste plastic that "already existed in nature".
"We decided to take samples from a rubbish dump in Islamabad, Pakistan, to see if anything was feeding on the plastic in the same way that other organisms feed on dead plant or animal matter," she said.