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Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis
- gpuhacker 6y agoFor a nonvideo source of info on this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1
- LockAndLol 6y agoAnd for a layman digestible version https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-helps-fungi-grow/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-helps-f... (from 2007)
- danielheath 6y ago> digestible version Ooh, was wondering if the fungi were good to eat /s
- seesawtron 6y ago>> radiation beneath a ≈ 1.7 mm thick lawn of the melanized radiotrophic fungus (180° protection radius) was 2.17±0.35% lower as compared to the negative control. 2% doesn't seem much but again its just from 1.7 mm thick fungus. Wouldn't it be easier to grow it on Earth instead and test with thicker fungus layer for a significant attenuation of the radiation? I understand that they want to use it eventually on the ISS but couldn't the prototype be tested on Earth as well?
- dogma1138 6y agoProtomolecule, not good.
- jonplackett 6y agoAnd they just found an ocean on Ceres. Is that in the book?
- dogma1138 6y agoNo, but the existence of water on Ceres was retconned in the show, now it’s again not accurate since while we discovered it has water between the book and the show we didn’t knew that it had that much water.
- trenchgun 6y agoThat is hilarious.
- garmaine 6y agoNo, much of the economic backdrop of the book involves transporting water to Ceres.
- dogma1138 6y agoYep but in the show in the first episode it was “fixed” the protestor says that Ceres used to have plenty of water until the inners stripped it for themselves.
- Cyphase 6y agoRelated discussion, including fun Expanse references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24113798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24113798
- einpoklum 6y agoOk, but: 1. Is it doable to maintain a 21-cm thick layer of fungus, at all, let alone in space, for a prolonged period of time? 2. Wouldn't it be easier/simpler to replicate this radio-synthesis mechanism in a non-organic setting?
- dogma1138 6y ago> Is it doable to maintain a 21-cm thick layer of fungus, at all, let alone in space, for a prolonged period of time? Building a living wall isn’t hard, I have one with moss in my flat it does wonders for air quality (even if not actual one just the smell/perception is enough), fungus is easy to grow - feed it shit and keep it in the dark does work. > Wouldn't it be easier/simpler to replicate this radio-synthesis mechanism in a non-organic setting? This is pretty much one the hardest things to do in science today, replicating complex biological processes in a non-biological manner. Insulin while being the first human protein to be synthesized today is still created using biotechnology by using bacteria to manufacture it simply because of how difficult it is to synthesize proteins.
- perl4ever 6y ago>Insulin while being the first human protein to be synthesized today is still created using biotechnology by using bacteria to manufacture it An interesting factoid I ran across is where citric acid comes from. I had noticed inexpensive "lemon iced tea" had citric acid listed as an ingredient, and vaguely thought perhaps it's called that just because the citrus source is heavily processed. Turns out, while citric acid was originally produced on an industrial scale from fruit, circa WWI, due to shortages, Pfizer started making it using microbes, specifically black mold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid
- dogma1138 6y agoCitric acid is used as a preservative and regulator in food so it will be added even if the ingredients contain it naturally simply for consistency with flavored drinks it’s even more common to basically break everything down to their base chemical ingredients and then add them back in at the exact amounts. Overall pretty much anything that is naturally produced in plants and animals will already be the most “efficient” way of doing that both due to natural selection and both due to the fact that the process is easily scalable, heck we still make rubber from the rubber tree because nothing else comes close to that. Chemistry is fucking hard and we don’t have anything close to the molecular machinery that living organisms have to assemble complex molecules. Chemistry in living things is like a robotic assembly line in a factory, chemistry in manufacturing is throw stuff into a reaction chamber and stir it until something happens.
- basicplus2 6y agoWhy are so many videos using computer generated voice overs? I find find it a real turn off.
- wombatmobile 6y agoThe videos are written, produced, generated and posted by autonomous GPT-3 bots. The first time any human became aware of this video was at the same time you became aware of it, by following the link from HN. Disclosure: This comment was written by an autonomous GPT-3 bot.
- ionwake 6y agoAre there any public ally accessible gpt-3 AIs yet?
- wombatmobile 6y agoWhat do you think is the difference between the way GPT-3 works and human beings work?
- GreenHeuristics 6y agointention
- speedgoose 6y agoEverything.
- kohtatsu 6y agoI feel like posting GPT generated content should include the prompt a courtesy. [prompt]For fun, there could be an extension to hide the prompt until you become suspicious and enter the konami code.[/prompt]
- mulmen 6y agoThis happened in a demo at work recently. I couldn't follow along, the robot voice was just too distracting. In that case I think it was someone insecure in their English skills, which I guess I can understand. I would rather they just do their best and we will make it work. Most of my coworkers are ESL anyway. If it's really a problem just ask someone else to do the voiceover. The robots are not anywhere close to good enough to do the narration without being incredibly distracting.
- LifeLiverTransp 6y agoSpace gardens full of fungi growing in solar winds..
- vffhfhf 6y agoIt used melanin to convert radiation to energy. Damn. We are so much alike. Its kinda funny every living organism in the earth is kinda related to us humans and we to them. Earth is just a biosphere.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoWell, we are as much alike as our consciousness/brain can manage to find a pattern for. The consciousness compresses reality by finding patterns. As long as we are able to understand some phenomenon, there will always be a pattern that this understanding is serviced by, and we will be able to see some relation between two different things through that pattern. In that sense, everything we perceive will be connected in one way or another. In that sense, everything is "one". But does that say anything about the physical world, or rather about our own brains, our consciousness and how it works? A matter of perspective. And of how you define "real".
- incidentnormal 6y agoOur ability to leverage those patterns underlies the success of our species, so I would say they are probably quite real.
- jorvi 6y agoFungi and animals actually have a common ancestor, protista. It's not exactly my area of expertise, but I believe that the way a fungus grows its tendrils and communicates over it is much like our nervous system. Here[0] is a fancy graphic that succinctly displays how the kingdoms of life are categorized. [0]https://biologydictionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tree_of_Living_Organisms.jpg https://biologydictionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tre...
- orthoxerox 6y agoProtista is a paraphyletic group of single-celled eukariotes. However, animals and fungi are each other's closest multi-cellular living relatives. Animals are closer to other holozoa, and fungi are closer to other holomycota, but both are equally distant from, for example, Amoebozoa, which includes many other protists.
- jbverschoor 6y agoIt’s the Access Virus Ti3 Synthesizer
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoAh so that's why Access basically dropped off the face of the Earth, they were trapped in the sarcophagus
- DeonPenny 6y agoThis is one of the most nature finds a way things I've ever seen
- acidburnNSA 6y agoIt shouldn't be too surprising since the universe and earth have been and remain naturally filled with radiation for billions of years. The heat that keeps magma warm in the earth comes 50% from radioactive decay of uranium and its daughters. Life today is based on plants and microorganisms absorbing radiation emanating from a giant nuclear reactor in the sky. This is just a twist on how it's always been done.
- barbegal 6y agoI am skeptical that this fungus absorbs radiation significantly more than the equivalent amount of water would. The paper [1] isn't very clear about possible inaccuracies in the results and I don't understand why this experiment hasn't been repeated down on Earth. The mass attenuation coefficient of the fungus is 0.234 cm^2/g at 100MeV whereas water is 0.0166 cm^2/g according to this paper [2]. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1.... [2] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a278139.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a278139.pdf Edit: I made a mistake in this comment, see child comment for correction.
- seesawtron 6y ago>> it could be shown that the melanized fungus C. sphaerospermum can be cultivated in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), while subject to the unique microgravity and radiation environment of the ISS. I believe this "small scale" experiment was meant as a "proof of concept" to illustrate the idea whether this could be done in house in adverse conditions (unlike Earth's conditions) and could be a potential long term solution for radiation attenuation. I would hope that these somewhat promising results would allow them to conduct a large scale experiment.
- barbegal 6y agoReading the paper again, I made a mistake in my comment above. The mass attenuation coefficient was at 10keV not 100MeV. Water has a mass attenuation coefficient of about 5cm^2/g at 10keV. Table 1 [1] in the paper shows the true comparison with water at 100 MeV where it can be seen that there is not a large difference. On a weight basis stainless steel outperforms the fungus. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1.full#T1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1....
- Hnrobert42 6y agoMaybe it’s because you have to ship stainless steel from Earth. Maybe the mass of the fungus can be grown from CO2 from respiration. The carbon originally coming from food, which has to be shipped up. Lots of maybes, but you know, maybe...
- adontz 6y agoIs not it how Godzilla works?
- blargmaster33 6y agoThere is one difference here that may be in the fungi favour. The fungi uses the energy to create molecular bonds, water for example just turns it into heat.
- blickentwapft 6y agoYou know where this leads? The blob. A 1959s sci fi horror movie in which a radioactive fungus takes over the world. If not today then very soon.
- ksaj 6y agoI think this speaks to a common fear of technology taking over and incidentally/consequentially killing everyone. Like the Terminator series, and many others as well. IRL you might recall the torrents of fearful articles and posts about the world being consumed by a human-triggered black hole when they started building the massive colliders. And every few years, someone predicts AI will do us in. And HAARP killing us with bad weather and earthquakes. So many examples abound.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> Scientists are thinking of shielding astronauts and space objects with a layer of this radiation-absorbing protective fungus. This reminds me of Adam Stone's discovery in Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live in Vain [1]: SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT Adam Stone has basically discovered that the radiation that causes the Great Pain of Space not only affects life, it is absorbed by it. So, surrounding yourself with other living creatures will prevent you from feeling the pain yourself. He eventually settles on building a shield out of live oysters, since they lack any central nervous system to experience pain with. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ScannersLiveInVain https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ScannersLi... END SPOILER ALERT _____________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain
- Nursie 6y agoHaha, yes that was the first thing that popped into my head too. I remember thinkig how ridiculous (but entertaining) an idea that was, like many of his very unusual thoughts. Maybe not so crazy after all!
- taneq 6y agoYes! Ever since I read that I’ve caught myself thinking of cosmic radiation as ‘the pain of space’.
- Method5440 6y agoInteresting - how haven’t I heard about that story? I immediately thought about how Rick covers his outpost in screaming Mortys so that the galactic government can’t detect him. Morty pain as anti-Rick is a strange, appealing and disturbing thought... they’re effectively oysters soaking up the pain of the universe.
- RichardCA 6y agoWhen I was in High School I had a teacher who taught a Literature of SF class. Every single short story in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 was required reading. I remain thankful to that teacher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_One,_1929%E2%80%931964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fa...
- freeflight 6y agoInterestingly enough this resilience of fungus, and even mold [0], to radiation has been a bit of a problem on the ISS [1]. [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190627121252.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190627121252.h... [1] https://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/2019/11/01/mold-space-nasa-grant-study-space-station-fungus https://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/2019/11/01/mold-space-nas...
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- burtonator 6y agoThere's simply no way that this type of fungus could absorb enough radiation simply because it's not dense enough. If you want to absorb radiation you have to block it which means it has to come into contact with matter. The only way you can do this is to have either a smaller volumetric amount of something that's dense (lead, gold, uranium, etc) or a LARGE amount of something less dense (water, concrete, etc). If you're just talking about an organic organism, sure, it can use the radiation BUT you'd need to have a MASSIVE amount of it in terms of volume and weight. Simply put, the fungus itself is sparse when looking at it from a subatomic perspective. Most of the radiation passes right through it.
- jojobas 6y agoAbsorbtion is a misnomer. It uses a tiny fraction of energy of whatever particle it is. In terms of attenuation it cant be different from anything else of similar density and composition.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoBut then why this seemingly-ridiculous line from the article? > Scientists are thinking of shielding astronauts and space objects with a layer of this radiation-absorbing protective fungus.
- 08-15 6y agoBecause NASA is no longer relevant, but desperately wants to be. So they publish anything, and anlways with a sensational headline: microbes that incorporate arsenic into biomolecules, reactionless microwave propulsion, and not fungal radiation shields. That line doesn't just seem ridiculous, it is.
- xsmasher 6y agoBecause the "article" is a clickbait Youtube video from a channel with videos like "Is the world ending in 2020?" and "Ghost caught on tape in my apartment." It doesn't even name the scientists. I went searching for "NASA Chernobyl fungus" and found a paper about using it as a shield on mars: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1 >Estimations based on linear attenuation coefficients indicated that a ~ 21 cm thick layer of this fungus could largely negate the annual dose-equivalent of the radiation environment on the surface of Mars, whereas only ~ 9 cm would be required with an equimolar mixture of melanin and Martian regolith. It makes more sense in the Mars context, where you might not have lead available, and where growing a large amount of fungus from a small seed packet is a big bonus.
- qubex 6y agoWhat’s astonishing is not the ability to block radiation (after all, biology will always defer to chemistry first, and physics second—there’s no way biology can come up with something that exceeds the capabilities of its substrates) but rather life’s way of rapidly adapting to make use of whichever energy source it can find to eke out an energy budget to thrive on. P.S. Who else heard Dr Ian Malcom say “Life... finds a way” in their head?
- walleeee 6y agoLife can't exceed the capabilities of its substrates on their own terms, but it's not clear that life can be fully explained in or reduced to those terms either. Anyways, yes, this is super cool.
- qubex 6y agoI’m glad you made this point, because it allows me to issue a cautionary word to those dualists who think that somehow the mind is something disjoint from the brain.
- walleeee 6y agoYes, I'm glad you mention that; unfortunately I think sometimes the idea that causation may be multi-dimensional (in other words, that there is not necessarily a single implicative model capable of wholly explaining all things) gets mistaken for some sort of dualism. But that view does not imply that mind and body are disjoint, are separate "essences", etc.
- qubex 6y ago“Minds are what brains do, like beats are what hearts do” is my favourite summary of that.
- raven105x 6y agoOn the contrary, I’d argue that most “life” (in the sense of our Eucledian definition of it) relies on exceeding the capabilities of its substrates via emergent properties - at least from the perspective of our current infantile understanding of the universe. Photosynthesis is so efficient because electrons jump multi-molecule gaps due to quantum effects, as we’ve found only a few years ago. The theory that most biological brains heavily leverage quantum processes is rapidly gaining ground as well - we simply lack the intelligence and processing capacity to design anything like it, since compared to our current computational abilities, millions of years worth of entropy may as well be an infinite amount. Reductionism fails as completely as it does hilariously when it comes to systems where the whole does indeed exceed the sum of its parts due to laws of the universe we have yet to grasp. A much more sane approach is to think of the matter something is comprised of as nothing more than a filter/transformer for the entropy and environment it exists within. Life routinely harnesses entropy whereas our current technology is so ass backwards it does little but struggle against it (dendrites in batteries, for example). What science considers to be degradation or wear and tear is the very process living things rely on to exist - let that sink in.
- Tade0 6y agoIs the fungus edible?
- bobhel 6y agoHere's the real question. Or, can it be made edible? Cultivating something like this on Mars out in the open makes more sense than growing potatoes indoors.
- dogma1138 6y agoEven if it’s not directly edible it can be a source of amino acids and proteins that could be then processed into something edible or be a source of food for other things that provide better nutritional value to humans like yeast. The question is it going to be more cost effective than hydroponics.
- tyingq 6y agoThere's a movie plot that's fairly adjacent to this and even has pretty good ratings: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7425298/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7425298/
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- ulmas 6y agoI'm actually surprised this cheaply written two paragraph article with no references is being discussed here.
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoTwo words: Mars Mission.