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Stories filed under: "organisms"

DailyDirt: Magic Mushrooms

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fungus is everywhere. One of the largest organisms in the world is actually a huge fungus over 2 miles across, growing in Oregon. Fungi might have even been the first organisms to live on land, and mushrooms covered the earth’s surface after the world’s worst mass extinction event — feeding off all the dead plants and animals. So it might not be cockroaches that inherit the earth, but fungus. And if we ever find alien life, it could look more like mushrooms than humanoid life.

• Mushrooms are often overlooked, but they’re vitally important to the earth’s ecosystem — helping to decompose all kinds of organic (and some inorganic) matter, creating the soils for plants to grow in, as well as providing a source for numerous life-saving drugs for us. Fungi might help us clean up pollution and get rid of various toxic wastes, so someday there might be another meaning for the term “magic mushrooms.” [url]
• White truffles are a rare delicacy — only found in the wild — with prices higher than gold. Other kinds of these edible mushrooms are expensive but not as rare, and the industry supplying these delicacies is a secretive and sometimes shady business. [url]
• Fungus isn’t just for eating anymore. Certain fungus species can be used to produce jet fuel. It’s still a challenge to scale up biofuel production using fungus, but it could be easier to get biofuels from fungus than from microorganisms like algae or from plants that need more resources for cultivation. [url]

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Filed Under: biofuels, delicacies, ecosystem, food, fungus, life, mass extinction event, mushrooms, organisms, white truffles

DailyDirt: Re-visting Vitalism

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In the early days of chemistry, organic molecules were thought to require a living source. Then Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea using a process that didn’t involve any living organisms. That chemical reaction struck down the hypothesis of vitalism — which suggested that living matter was fundamentally different from inanimate chemicals. Over a hundred years later, though, no one has really discovered how to create living materials from scratch. Here are just a few projects that could change that.

• Martin Hanczyc gives a TED talk about the difference between life and non-life. Making a chemical “protocell” model might help us understand how life develops from non-living materials. [url]
• Working on metal-based life could lead to the discovery of completely non-organic life. Inorganic chemical reactions could form self-replicating structures with sufficient complexity to begin evolutionary processes. Maybe. [url]
• Re-programming worms to create an unnatural amino acid could be the start of designing artificial lifeforms with unnatural traits. This achievement is just a proof of principle project that could lead to other biological techniques for modifying the genetic expression in all kinds of multicellular animals. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: amino acids, biology, life, non-organic, organic chemistry, organisms, protocell, unnatural, vitalism