> we cautiously suggest that the ability of melanin to capture electromagnetic radiation combined with its remarkable oxidation-reduction properties may confer upon melanotic organisms the ability to harness radiation for metabolic energy. The enhanced growth of melanotic fungi in
conditions of radiation fluxes suggests the need for additional investigation to ascertain the mechanism for this effect.
The book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir this is exactly what they do - have a layer of the bacteria (which is integral to the plot) between the hull and where the humans lived.
In the Expanse books, space colonies would consume algae. Using some alien woo-woo, they engineered one with a superior yield because it could supplement its inputs with radiation.
In the short lived HBO comedy Avenue 5 the ship was surrounded by a “poop shield” that used human excrement as a radiation shield. Someone forgot to vent the system and it burst, sending feces flying in a small orbit around the ship.
Later on, one of the characters sees the face of Pope John Paul II in the poop and the owner of the spaceship (who was supposed to be played by Jack Black but instead Josh Gad ruined the entire series) sends up a laser light show to illuminate the dookies in space.
> Beneath the ocean’s surface, bacteria have evolved specialized enzymes that can digest PET plastic, the material used in bottles and clothes. Researchers at KAUST discovered that a unique molecular signature distinguishes enzymes capable of efficiently breaking down plastic. Found in nearly 80% of ocean samples, these PETase variants show nature’s growing adaptation to human pollution.
Plastic-eating bacteria could be one of the most destructive forces we’ve ever faced, given how dependent we’ve become on plastics. We’d lose domestic electricity due to the degradation of insulation. We’d lose water due to the loss of water pipes. Modern houses would fall apart as the resin in plywood turns to mush. Supply lines would completely fall apart as roads turn to potholed mud, and the trucks that drive on them grind to a halt. It’s a true nightmare situation. I assume the smell would be awful too, as almost every surface is treated with plastic paints, varnishes and coverings.
> It is currently unknown how these aggregates will perform in the mid- to long-term, or what effect their degradation might have on surrounding ecosystems.
This... doesn't entirely sound like the best idea since wear on it as an aggregate part could contribute to microplastics.
> What does infrastructure look like in the future? How can we build more sustainable roads? How do we solve climate challenges, such as stormwater drainage? Two men from the Netherlands, Anne Koudstaal and Simon Jorritsma, suggested using plastic, and in 2013 they drew the first concept for a road made of recycled plastic.
I'd like to think I was smart enough to think of roads made with recycled plastics, but I guess I was assuming that once bacteria attack plastics, then all hydrocarbon materials are pretty much in the firing line.
I was going to ask about plastic eating microbes in my comment. Even metal eating microbes. I wonder how we'll handle that when they start destroying the foundation of civilization. Lol
I few months ago I learnt something related that may be a common knowledge to many here. I feel silly that I didn't know.
Earth had a plastic like problem before. There were no fungi that eat cellulose so dead trees were just piling up without degrading. Those trees turned into ~petroleum~ coal that we consume now.
That trees somehow turned into ~petroleum~ coal, I learnt in school. I used to imagine trees were somehow buried under stand suddenly and before they could be degraded they turned into ~petroleum~ coal under heavy pressure.
Yes, the Carboniferous Period! I learned about this a few years ago and was astonished.
> The world at beginning of the Carboniferous period was a humid, tropical place. Seasons, if any, were indistinct. The Carboniferous trees and plants resembled those that live in tropical and mildly temperate areas today. They grew in wetlands and were shallow-rooted. This, combined with their great height and ponderous weight, was a bad combination, because these enormous trees would regularly become uprooted and topple into the marshy ground, landing on other trees that preceded them.
> Here is where fate steps in. Although trees had evolved lignin and cellulose, no bacteria that could digest these woody substances had yet evolved. In fact, those bacteria would take another 60 million years to evolve. All this time huge trees kept growing, crashing into the swampy ground, and piling up on top of uncounted other trees, getting buried deeper and deeper into the ground. Over millions of years, subjected to the heat and pressure of deep burial, the carbon in these trees was converted into the fossil fuels we know and love today – coal, oil, and natural gas. All the fossil fuels we use were produced during this 60-million year period.
It could be that the bacterial life was less varied than now. Fewer starting points reduces the chance of a particular useful set of mutations coming together. The individual parts might have randomly occurred a great many times before they happened in one population.
Also the availability of other resources might have meant that even if eating the tree parts did develop earlier it just wasn't enough to be a key survival advantage, especially if initial “versions” of the process were inefficient. Perhaps what happening was in one strain it lost the ability to feed on the older sources but had the latent ability to consume the new ones, even if much less efficient, so switched and continued from there to quickly refine the process via further mutation. Changes in the availability of other components, which the trees themselves will have had a hand in, will have changed the balance but over a significant amount of time.
Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly the components of our plastics and how they hang together are not that novel, requiring less changes to come together in one individual or population to make consuming them practical.
Algae and phytoplankton, but mostly algae. Not large creatures, generally. You'd get massive blooms with phyto/zoo plankton die-offs, they'd settle, then get buried in sand and sediment. Over centuries and millenia, you'd get cyclic deposits, creating massive accumulations, and then over geologic timeframes, you get pockets of striated deposits of these decomposing materials in high heat and pressure conditions. Once the deposits liquefy, they all flow into a common area.
Depending on the conditions and chemistry, you can get coal from ancient algal sources, but you can't get petroleum / liquid oil from ancient forests - the chemistry doesn't work out. You need lots of water and heat and pressure, single cell structures. Lots of cellulose and lignin means you don't get the liquefaction and mixing, forcing the material to carbonize and compress instead.
I’m not even remotely close to knowledgeable on this subject but I assume metal eating microbes are not possible because metals are not molecular and therefore there’s nothing for them to be broken down into
To a large extent, it probably won't be too bad because the density of plastics is still low in the general environment. If there are steep energy gradients, eventually life tends to take advantage of them.
Also there's the risk that we accidentally release some genetically modified bacteria and they prove to be hardier than expected.
Very hard to do because silicon dioxide (aka quartz / glass) forms an inert physical barrier to prevent further oxidation. Kinetics and diffusion say no!
This was my take for a short story I banged out one week after reading about the metal-eating microbes. Basically, humanity was all "three cheers for these little guys helping us fix all the pollution, etc" then shifting to "huh, that's an awful lot of changes happening to the gas content of the air and oh, didn't you corporate guys who sold us these solutions say you had these microbes under control? Oh, you did? But...like past tense?"
I read too much dystopian sci-fi to write much else, but in truth, I have pretty high hopes for these garbage-eating microbes.
When I was younger, I picked up a copy of "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters"[0] at a used book sale. While the book itself was rather shlocky, I always thought the premise was very compelling.
From memory; a scientist created a breed of bacteria that could digest a special food-like plastic, which was accidentally released, but sporulated as their special food source could not be found in the environment. Decades later, a product company introduced "bio-degradable" plastic for greener packaging, which happened to be similar enough to their original food source that the bacteria were able to feed on it. Unfortunately for humanity, plastic itself was also much more widely distributed in the current year, and the bacteria was able to make the jump from eating this plastic to eating "any" plastic. (For added drama, this process also resulted in the release of explosive gases - methane, maybe?)
Also perhaps related, I also picked up The Last Gasp[1] at the same book sale, another speculative sci-fi about global warming. It was very influential on my preteen mind.
Thanks for sharing! I will have to check out The Last Gasp. Heck of a title, that. The reviews seem to paint it as something that's up my particular alley.
I think this is a fallacious expectation. For most environments, I don't see why there would be selective pressure towards plastic degradation. That is, "burning" plastic as fuel would likely require the absence of an alternative. Obviously this hasn't happened with coal or oil, although those are energy dense fuels. There are already organisms which have the enzymatic means for the break down of some plastics. Given the omnipresence of plastic pollution, if there was selective pressure, we would probably have seen some specialization already. Especially for microbes. It took a looong time before fungi were able to breakdown lignin. Before that, the only thing removing dead trees was fire. So... there is a good chance we are going to see shit all. Especially on land.
What's weird is that this is based on melanin, and how fast it happened. Doeswould seem at least likely that this is life digging up an old recipe rather than coming up with something new. Melanin can usefully absorb high-energy gamma rays ... that means there must have been a period, long enough, in earth's history where high energy gamma rays were easy to come by.
That could only have been on land, or in the very top layer of the ocean (because they don't pass through water).
So where in earth's history do we have a period where a large landmass had sufficient wattage in high energy gamma rays? Or at the very least a lot of UV rays, enough to damage/kill normal life. Such a place would otherwise have been very unhealthy for almost all life, as it destroys DNA.
It does find, though last time evolution took some million years to figure out how to break polymers. (That period is known as the Carboniferous period)
Yeah I should have clarified. Like DIRECTLY on the sun :) It's not much of a spoiler, but the main problem of the book is a microbe consuming the suns radiation and robbing Earth of sunlight.
It may have mutated to deal with radiation but radiation friendly organisms have been around for millions of years. Desulforudis audaxviator lives miles underground living on radioactive decay products.
>As the environment at that depth is so much like the early Earth, it may indicate what types of organisms existed before there was an oxygen atmosphere. Billions of years ago, some of the planet's first bacteria may have thrived in similar conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desulforudis_audaxviator
Wow, this is impressive. It's also the exact storyline from the animated series 'Common Side Effects', a really good series that feels more like watching a feature film.
I'm honestly disappointed that this post got so much attention with such a dubious source. The article doesn't even link to a press release, as far as I can tell.
It gives both the full name of fungus and the name of a researcher plus his affiliation. More information than you often get fore more 'reputable' sources. Criticizing something only on the basis of the source, while the actual content is completely fine, is peak cargo cult information literacy.
I mean, this isn't THAT surprising. Photosynthesis after all is just radiosynthesis of electromagnetic radiation in the visible or near visible spectrum. Gamma radiation is the same phenomenon, just with a far higher frequency and enough energy to ionize molecules.
The chemical process obviously has to differ considering gamma radiation has enough energy to knock off electrons, but once you deal with that, it's energy ripe for the taking. I'm not shocked that life finds a way to harness that energy where abundant.
In fact, had life come about on an Earth with a weaker magnetic field, it may have relied more on gamma radiation than visible light, especially considering the larger potential amount of consumable energy present in gamma rays.
I assume it does not need to be mentioned that this does NOT "clean up" nuclear waste. It just means that the constant energy emitted by it can be harnessed by these fungi. The radioactive material will remain hazardous for the same amount of time as if the fungi did not exist.
If I had a chunk of uranium but it was covered in an algae that absorbed all radiation out of the chunk, isn’t it much faster? As the effects of the uranium is largely mitigated.
At most it'd act as a form of shielding, pretty sure. Even if it were to incorporate the uranium, the "best" effect you'd get is diffusion of the chunk.
No. Radioactive materials decay at the same rate no matter what you do to them.
> the effects of the uranium is largely mitigated
Very different from decaying faster. It's possible that by covering it in algae you block the radiation from escaping. But the algae is still going to have to sit there for 10000 years without moving before the waste is decayed. You're better off sticking it inside lead.
Consider the sci-fi trope of "mutants" resulting from existing animals exposed to radiation, I think it may be more common and likely for just the "microbiome" like fungi and bacteria to mutate instead and then that could affect the macro fauna in new ways.
Apparently trees used to lay fallen on the ground for millions (?) of years before fungus evolved to eat them, and since then there has been no new coal.
(I may be wildly off on the specifics but that is the gist I got from reading stuff here and there)
I swear fungi are the coolest and most "alien" lifeforms on this planet next to cephalopods ଳ
Fungi existed before plants, and definitely before plants evolved to the point of being what we'd consider trees. In fact, we find large fungi fossils that once likely lined the landscape like trees do now.
Lichens pretty much were what created the first terrestrial organic material. Which in turn became soil for mosses which then built up the soil layer more and so on
https://archive.is/SGbVB
Found a paper on it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1866175/pdf/pone.00...
> we cautiously suggest that the ability of melanin to capture electromagnetic radiation combined with its remarkable oxidation-reduction properties may confer upon melanotic organisms the ability to harness radiation for metabolic energy. The enhanced growth of melanotic fungi in conditions of radiation fluxes suggests the need for additional investigation to ascertain the mechanism for this effect.
Space shield?
The book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir this is exactly what they do - have a layer of the bacteria (which is integral to the plot) between the hull and where the humans lived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary
Good, fun book. The main protagonists are a bit too inventive and quick to do solve, fix things. But in all fairness it's SF after all.
That was a great book and there is a movie in the works!
It looks good, big budget with Ryan Gosling as MC
In the Expanse books, space colonies would consume algae. Using some alien woo-woo, they engineered one with a superior yield because it could supplement its inputs with radiation.
In the short lived HBO comedy Avenue 5 the ship was surrounded by a “poop shield” that used human excrement as a radiation shield. Someone forgot to vent the system and it burst, sending feces flying in a small orbit around the ship.
Later on, one of the characters sees the face of Pope John Paul II in the poop and the owner of the spaceship (who was supposed to be played by Jack Black but instead Josh Gad ruined the entire series) sends up a laser light show to illuminate the dookies in space.
Life finds a way.
We're going to see an increase in plastic metabolizing bacteria as well, so eventually our plastics will 'rust' and degrade faster.
> We're going to see an increase in plastic metabolizing bacteria as well
https://big.ucdavis.edu/blog/plastic-eating-microbe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETase
November 4th : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251104013023.h...
> Beneath the ocean’s surface, bacteria have evolved specialized enzymes that can digest PET plastic, the material used in bottles and clothes. Researchers at KAUST discovered that a unique molecular signature distinguishes enzymes capable of efficiently breaking down plastic. Found in nearly 80% of ocean samples, these PETase variants show nature’s growing adaptation to human pollution.
Also an HN thread,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886479 ("Widespread distribution of bacteria containing PETases across global oceans (oup.com)"—1 day ago, 72 comments)
(The new $300 iPhone thong is made of PET (polyester), so, it's reassuring to know the universe does have the capability to unmake those).
Thong… omg haha
Haha but pedantically it’s a correct use of the word :)
> A narrow strip of material, typically leather, used to fasten, bind, or secure objects.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thong
Pendantically, too.
[dead]
Plastic-eating bacteria could be one of the most destructive forces we’ve ever faced, given how dependent we’ve become on plastics. We’d lose domestic electricity due to the degradation of insulation. We’d lose water due to the loss of water pipes. Modern houses would fall apart as the resin in plywood turns to mush. Supply lines would completely fall apart as roads turn to potholed mud, and the trucks that drive on them grind to a halt. It’s a true nightmare situation. I assume the smell would be awful too, as almost every surface is treated with plastic paints, varnishes and coverings.
> Supply lines would completely fall apart as roads turn to potholed mud, and the trucks that drive on them grind to a halt.
What plastic is there in a road???
Some roads are attempting to take waste plastic and use it in place of other parts in the aggregate for asphalt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_road
> It is currently unknown how these aggregates will perform in the mid- to long-term, or what effect their degradation might have on surrounding ecosystems.
This... doesn't entirely sound like the best idea since wear on it as an aggregate part could contribute to microplastics.
https://www.orbia.com/this-is-orbia/news-and-stories/plastic...
> What does infrastructure look like in the future? How can we build more sustainable roads? How do we solve climate challenges, such as stormwater drainage? Two men from the Netherlands, Anne Koudstaal and Simon Jorritsma, suggested using plastic, and in 2013 they drew the first concept for a road made of recycled plastic.
https://www.asphaltpavement.org/expertise/engineering/plasti... (this is from an asphalt paving trade group... so take what it says with appropriate skepticism)
https://stateline.org/2022/12/12/plastic-roads-are-paved-wit... appears to reference the National Asphalt Pavement Association material also.
I'd like to think I was smart enough to think of roads made with recycled plastics, but I guess I was assuming that once bacteria attack plastics, then all hydrocarbon materials are pretty much in the firing line.
I was going to ask about plastic eating microbes in my comment. Even metal eating microbes. I wonder how we'll handle that when they start destroying the foundation of civilization. Lol
I few months ago I learnt something related that may be a common knowledge to many here. I feel silly that I didn't know.
Earth had a plastic like problem before. There were no fungi that eat cellulose so dead trees were just piling up without degrading. Those trees turned into ~petroleum~ coal that we consume now.
That trees somehow turned into ~petroleum~ coal, I learnt in school. I used to imagine trees were somehow buried under stand suddenly and before they could be degraded they turned into ~petroleum~ coal under heavy pressure.
Yes, the Carboniferous Period! I learned about this a few years ago and was astonished.
> The world at beginning of the Carboniferous period was a humid, tropical place. Seasons, if any, were indistinct. The Carboniferous trees and plants resembled those that live in tropical and mildly temperate areas today. They grew in wetlands and were shallow-rooted. This, combined with their great height and ponderous weight, was a bad combination, because these enormous trees would regularly become uprooted and topple into the marshy ground, landing on other trees that preceded them.
> Here is where fate steps in. Although trees had evolved lignin and cellulose, no bacteria that could digest these woody substances had yet evolved. In fact, those bacteria would take another 60 million years to evolve. All this time huge trees kept growing, crashing into the swampy ground, and piling up on top of uncounted other trees, getting buried deeper and deeper into the ground. Over millions of years, subjected to the heat and pressure of deep burial, the carbon in these trees was converted into the fossil fuels we know and love today – coal, oil, and natural gas. All the fossil fuels we use were produced during this 60-million year period.
https://emagazine.com/carbon-in-trees/
All the fossil fuels? Aren't some made of dead dinosaurs?
There has been a lot more plant biomass over the eons than dinosaurs
Isn't that nuts? It took like 50 million years.
Meanwhile we got plastic-eating bacteria after like 100 years.
It could be that the bacterial life was less varied than now. Fewer starting points reduces the chance of a particular useful set of mutations coming together. The individual parts might have randomly occurred a great many times before they happened in one population.
Also the availability of other resources might have meant that even if eating the tree parts did develop earlier it just wasn't enough to be a key survival advantage, especially if initial “versions” of the process were inefficient. Perhaps what happening was in one strain it lost the ability to feed on the older sources but had the latent ability to consume the new ones, even if much less efficient, so switched and continued from there to quickly refine the process via further mutation. Changes in the availability of other components, which the trees themselves will have had a hand in, will have changed the balance but over a significant amount of time.
Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly the components of our plastics and how they hang together are not that novel, requiring less changes to come together in one individual or population to make consuming them practical.
Funny, we make plastics from petroleum, so it looks like some particular carbon atoms just don't want to go back in the circuit.
You mean coal. Petroleum was from the dead animals from millions of years ago.
Algae and phytoplankton, but mostly algae. Not large creatures, generally. You'd get massive blooms with phyto/zoo plankton die-offs, they'd settle, then get buried in sand and sediment. Over centuries and millenia, you'd get cyclic deposits, creating massive accumulations, and then over geologic timeframes, you get pockets of striated deposits of these decomposing materials in high heat and pressure conditions. Once the deposits liquefy, they all flow into a common area.
Depending on the conditions and chemistry, you can get coal from ancient algal sources, but you can't get petroleum / liquid oil from ancient forests - the chemistry doesn't work out. You need lots of water and heat and pressure, single cell structures. Lots of cellulose and lignin means you don't get the liquefaction and mixing, forcing the material to carbonize and compress instead.
I’m not even remotely close to knowledgeable on this subject but I assume metal eating microbes are not possible because metals are not molecular and therefore there’s nothing for them to be broken down into
Why is this being down voted? It's a question?
To a large extent, it probably won't be too bad because the density of plastics is still low in the general environment. If there are steep energy gradients, eventually life tends to take advantage of them.
Also there's the risk that we accidentally release some genetically modified bacteria and they prove to be hardier than expected.
We will invent something to kill them, as usual.
Only if antibiotic resistant bacteria don't kill us first.
Always trust humans when united
We might soon need silicon-eating microbes.
Very hard to do because silicon dioxide (aka quartz / glass) forms an inert physical barrier to prevent further oxidation. Kinetics and diffusion say no!
Can you elaborate on this? Nothing could get through that barrier? Like is it impossible for fungi to do that?
HF-secreting microorganisms with a tropism for a material extremely common in the human environment? No way that could go wrong.
I'm not asking if it could go "wrong", which is a matter of perspective though.
I guess you can see it can't work because glass is typically the material used by scientists to contain microbes.
This was my take for a short story I banged out one week after reading about the metal-eating microbes. Basically, humanity was all "three cheers for these little guys helping us fix all the pollution, etc" then shifting to "huh, that's an awful lot of changes happening to the gas content of the air and oh, didn't you corporate guys who sold us these solutions say you had these microbes under control? Oh, you did? But...like past tense?"
I read too much dystopian sci-fi to write much else, but in truth, I have pretty high hopes for these garbage-eating microbes.
When I was younger, I picked up a copy of "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters"[0] at a used book sale. While the book itself was rather shlocky, I always thought the premise was very compelling.
From memory; a scientist created a breed of bacteria that could digest a special food-like plastic, which was accidentally released, but sporulated as their special food source could not be found in the environment. Decades later, a product company introduced "bio-degradable" plastic for greener packaging, which happened to be similar enough to their original food source that the bacteria were able to feed on it. Unfortunately for humanity, plastic itself was also much more widely distributed in the current year, and the bacteria was able to make the jump from eating this plastic to eating "any" plastic. (For added drama, this process also resulted in the release of explosive gases - methane, maybe?)
Also perhaps related, I also picked up The Last Gasp[1] at the same book sale, another speculative sci-fi about global warming. It was very influential on my preteen mind.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1685500.The_Last_Gasp
Thanks for sharing! I will have to check out The Last Gasp. Heck of a title, that. The reviews seem to paint it as something that's up my particular alley.
I think this is a fallacious expectation. For most environments, I don't see why there would be selective pressure towards plastic degradation. That is, "burning" plastic as fuel would likely require the absence of an alternative. Obviously this hasn't happened with coal or oil, although those are energy dense fuels. There are already organisms which have the enzymatic means for the break down of some plastics. Given the omnipresence of plastic pollution, if there was selective pressure, we would probably have seen some specialization already. Especially for microbes. It took a looong time before fungi were able to breakdown lignin. Before that, the only thing removing dead trees was fire. So... there is a good chance we are going to see shit all. Especially on land.
What's weird is that this is based on melanin, and how fast it happened. Doeswould seem at least likely that this is life digging up an old recipe rather than coming up with something new. Melanin can usefully absorb high-energy gamma rays ... that means there must have been a period, long enough, in earth's history where high energy gamma rays were easy to come by.
That could only have been on land, or in the very top layer of the ocean (because they don't pass through water).
So where in earth's history do we have a period where a large landmass had sufficient wattage in high energy gamma rays? Or at the very least a lot of UV rays, enough to damage/kill normal life. Such a place would otherwise have been very unhealthy for almost all life, as it destroys DNA.
It does find, though last time evolution took some million years to figure out how to break polymers. (That period is known as the Carboniferous period)
Well, good thing it had a head start now.
Related. Others?
A Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl by Drinking Radiation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43148355 - Feb 2025 (10 comments)
Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166994 - Aug 2020 (104 comments)
Radiotrophic fungus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342750 - July 2019 (63 comments)
Chernobyl Fungus Feeds On Radiation (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6763520 - Nov 2013 (53 comments)
Black Fungus Found in Chernobyl Eats Harmful Radiation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127626 - March 2008 (1 comment)
Radiotrophic fungus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342750 - July 2019 (63 comments)
Inserted above. Thanks!
This sounds like a plot point in Project Hail Mary. Which has a microbe that lives off the sun, creating problems, and new technologies.
> a microbe that lives off the sun
Like algae?
Yeah I should have clarified. Like DIRECTLY on the sun :) It's not much of a spoiler, but the main problem of the book is a microbe consuming the suns radiation and robbing Earth of sunlight.
> lives off the sun, creating problems, and new technologies.
It sounds like humans, from the description. Not sure if that was the joke.
This is a bit of a spoiler but in the book, the astrophage sits on the Sun and eats it.
Ah!
It may have mutated to deal with radiation but radiation friendly organisms have been around for millions of years. Desulforudis audaxviator lives miles underground living on radioactive decay products.
>As the environment at that depth is so much like the early Earth, it may indicate what types of organisms existed before there was an oxygen atmosphere. Billions of years ago, some of the planet's first bacteria may have thrived in similar conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desulforudis_audaxviator
Wow, this is impressive. It's also the exact storyline from the animated series 'Common Side Effects', a really good series that feels more like watching a feature film.
Content aside, it would be better if we avoided sources like UNILAD [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNILAD
I'm honestly disappointed that this post got so much attention with such a dubious source. The article doesn't even link to a press release, as far as I can tell.
It gives both the full name of fungus and the name of a researcher plus his affiliation. More information than you often get fore more 'reputable' sources. Criticizing something only on the basis of the source, while the actual content is completely fine, is peak cargo cult information literacy.
The protomolecule???
I mean, this isn't THAT surprising. Photosynthesis after all is just radiosynthesis of electromagnetic radiation in the visible or near visible spectrum. Gamma radiation is the same phenomenon, just with a far higher frequency and enough energy to ionize molecules.
The chemical process obviously has to differ considering gamma radiation has enough energy to knock off electrons, but once you deal with that, it's energy ripe for the taking. I'm not shocked that life finds a way to harness that energy where abundant.
In fact, had life come about on an Earth with a weaker magnetic field, it may have relied more on gamma radiation than visible light, especially considering the larger potential amount of consumable energy present in gamma rays.
they should spread some in fuel rod storage pools to see how it does
Ah yes unilad a great repository of rigorous scientific results haha.
There's a lot of complexity in fungal physiology and research has barely scratched the surface.
We've known this for 40 years? Why is it news today?
I assume it does not need to be mentioned that this does NOT "clean up" nuclear waste. It just means that the constant energy emitted by it can be harnessed by these fungi. The radioactive material will remain hazardous for the same amount of time as if the fungi did not exist.
Fungi "eating" radioactive materials would disperse them to some extent, making the contamination problem worse.
If I had a chunk of uranium but it was covered in an algae that absorbed all radiation out of the chunk, isn’t it much faster? As the effects of the uranium is largely mitigated.
At most it'd act as a form of shielding, pretty sure. Even if it were to incorporate the uranium, the "best" effect you'd get is diffusion of the chunk.
> isn't it much faster
No. Radioactive materials decay at the same rate no matter what you do to them.
> the effects of the uranium is largely mitigated
Very different from decaying faster. It's possible that by covering it in algae you block the radiation from escaping. But the algae is still going to have to sit there for 10000 years without moving before the waste is decayed. You're better off sticking it inside lead.
Consider the sci-fi trope of "mutants" resulting from existing animals exposed to radiation, I think it may be more common and likely for just the "microbiome" like fungi and bacteria to mutate instead and then that could affect the macro fauna in new ways.
It had to be fucking fungus
Apparently trees used to lay fallen on the ground for millions (?) of years before fungus evolved to eat them, and since then there has been no new coal.
(I may be wildly off on the specifics but that is the gist I got from reading stuff here and there)
I swear fungi are the coolest and most "alien" lifeforms on this planet next to cephalopods ଳ
Or they're the original and we're the alien
Fungi existed before plants, and definitely before plants evolved to the point of being what we'd consider trees. In fact, we find large fungi fossils that once likely lined the landscape like trees do now.
Just fact checked this. TIL, for some reason I thought plants came before fungi.
I think idea was that fungi for some time couldn't consume lignin in fallen trees.
[flagged]
Lichens pretty much were what created the first terrestrial organic material. Which in turn became soil for mosses which then built up the soil layer more and so on
Pretty neat.