What These Mushrooms Eat Will Surprise You
make short work of: to finish or deal with something quickly and easily
We eat mushrooms. But mushrooms are eaters too, and their diet is far stranger than ours. Scientists are now putting that hunger to work.
After a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers tried something new. They spread oyster mushrooms over the polluted soil. The mushrooms made short work of the oil, clearing almost all of the pollution from the soil in about two months. This oil would normally have stayed in the soil for decades.
In the Amazon, a team from Yale found an even stranger fungus. It can live on nothing but plastic. It breaks down tough plastic that normally lasts for hundreds of years, even at the bottom of landfills where there is no oxygen.
The strangest case is inside the dead reactor at Chernobyl. Black fungi grow on the walls, and they seem to feed on the radiation itself. Stranger still, they grow toward the danger, reaching for the most radioactive spots instead of away. NASA even grew them on the Space Station to test them as a shield against space radiation.
Now one company wants fungi to clean up something else: us. A Dutch inventor named Bob Hendrikx grows coffins from living mushroom roots, in just seven days. His “Living Cocoon” returns a body to the soil in two to three years, far faster than a normal coffin. The fungus draws the toxins and metals out of our bodies, leaving behind only rich soil where new life can grow.
Sample sentences
With three of us helping, we made short work of the moving boxes and finished before lunch.
I thought painting the fence would take forever, but I made short work of it with my new paint sprayer.
The new software makes short work of a report that used to take me two full days.
Read More
Fungus from the Amazon devours plastic
Chernobyl’s Strange Black Fungi Have a Superpower
Bob Hendrikx designs “living coffin” from mushroom mycelium
Mushrooms Clean Up Our Toxic Messes
