Equal parts cosmic horror and nature being metal, let's talk about the lichen that grew on the OUTSIDE of the International Space Station!
Get your tea and curl up, because I PROMISE you wanna hear about these fungal cosmonauts 🧑🚀
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Starting at the beginning:
In 1988, we first learned that fungi could survive in outer space in a VERY DRAMATIC WAY. Astronauts on the Russian space station Mir saw a strange film spreading across the OUTSIDE of a window.
This feels like something from the Magnus Archives 😨
The substance KEPT GROWING, destroying the window's titanium-quartz surface and GETTING INTO THE SPACE STATION!
Listen, I know you're thinking 👽aliens👽, but it was the opposite: these were just piggyback astronauts who'd hitched a ride from Earth.
Yup, turns out that 6 kinds of fungi had managed to join the team uninvited, and they quickly adapted to their new environment.
While this might sound creepy, it was SO EXCITING for astrobiologists! We had PROOF that fungi could THRIVE in space!
Nowadays, there are pretty robust anti-fungal measures to keep our sporing friends from joining space crews uninvited. Even if they're super cool, typically we want to keep our space missions sterile.
UNLESS! (now you say it)
The European Space Agency is heading up the The Lichens and Fungi Experiment (LIFE ... god I love nerds), specifically testing how fungi behave in space and in Mars-like conditions.
Around 2012, the lichen 'Xanthoria elegans' (commonly known as the Elegant Sunburst Lichen!) was attached to exterior of the International Space Station for 18 months AND SURVIVED!
With no water, no air, extreme temperatures and constant bombardment with radiation!
The BEST PART is that the lichen didn't go into stasis, but kept right on photosynthesizing. Just chomp 🌞chomp 🌞 chompin' 🌞 on that unfiltered sunlight.
Lichen might be the TOUGHEST organism on earth. But what even is 💚lichen💚?
Lichen is actually a composite organism, meaning that it’s actually a plant (algae) or bacteria (cyanobacteria) who has joined forces with a fungus (or a few fungi).
Lichen are classified as fungus, but have many of the benefits of being a plant AND a fungus.
Fungi can’t make their own food, but plants do it all the time through photosynthesis. And plants struggle to gather nutrients from their environment, but fungi kicks ass at that. So they teamed up and formed a whole kind of super fungus!
Fun fact, a lot of things we call moss are actually lichen ("reindeer moss", "Iceland moss"). Also peat moss isn’t moss, but at least that one really is a plant. For more MOSS FACTS read Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. BUT BACK TO LICHEN!
Lichen are a big deal on earth. First off, they’re GORGEOUS but also they cover 6–8% of Earth's land surface! We know of 20000 species but there are likely MANY MANY MORE.
We estimate that we’ve only discovered 10% of fungi, as opposed to 85% of plants.
Those space lichen were outside for 18 months, and about 35% survived. And if that seems low, I want to remind you that the rate for animals and plants is 0% --
BUT THERE IS MORE! There was a sub-group that was in "mars-like conditions" and 70% of THOSE survived!
Fungi are INCREDIBLE at dealing with radiation. Lichen can survive 12000x the dose that would kill a human.
We also think some fungi (including mushrooms) might EAT radiation through ☢️radiosynthesis☢️. Let's take a quick detour to the Chernobyl disaster site.
In 1991, remotely piloted robots discovered a black fungus growing INSIDE one the Chernobyl reactors. The black colour was caused by melanin, the same pigment in human skin, eyes and hair than helps US withstand radiation!
Further research revealed that these fungi grew faster when exposed to more radiation. They weren't growing DESPITE the radiation, but BECAUSE of it!
We found that cryptococcus neoformans was so good at it, we got curious if we could use this to our own advantage.
Citation:
Dadachova E, Casadevall A. Ionizing radiation: how fungi cope, adapt, and exploit with the help of melanin. Curr Opin Microbiol. 2008 Dec;11(6):525-31. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2008.09.013. Epub 2008 Oct 24. PMID: 18848901; PMCID: PMC2677413.
BACK TO SPACE!
NASA sent these melanized fungi to space in 2016, and determined that the fungi could cut radiation levels on the ISS by ~2%!
They EAT the radiation and that could be really important for other organisms at risk of radiation sickness.
Next step? MUSHROOM HOUSES ON MARS!
NASA is investigating myco-architecture. Imagine human explorers bringing dormant fungi, adding water on arrival allowing the fungi to grow around a framework into a fully functional human habitat!
It's like a chia pet house!
Update: we put Maritime Sunburst Lichen in simulated mars conditions, and it's live laugh lovin' it.
"Results indicated that the production of antioxidants, along with the occurrence of photoprotection mechanisms, guarantee X. parietina survivability in Mars-like environment."
Citations:
Maritime Sunburst lichen
Mushrooms houses on mars
This has gotten bigger than o ever imagined 😅 I will never monetize my Twitter or paywall my content, so if you want to tip your local mushroom nerd, you can do that here: ko-fi.com/gnome_anne
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🍄𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐤𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞👻
I teamed up with Anna from the Mycologist’s Primer to bring you some delightfully eerie mushroom folklore. So put the kettle on, collect your rowan branch & salt, because we're talking devils, witches, troll cats, fae, will-o-wisps & more!🧵
Witch's butter (tremella mesenterica) 🧙♀️🧈 is a BRIGHT orange edible fungus. But if it's growing on your door or gate, that means you’ve been the target of a witch’s hex. The remedy? Stab the fungus & the witch will be forced to appear! That's one way to meet you new goth gf👀
A grosser & cuter version is the Scandinavian myth of troll cats🐈⬛-- witches’ familiars they made from human hair, nails, wood shavings. Troll cats gorge themselves on cow’s milk & flee gleefully, spewing up remains as "butter of the witches." If you've ever had a cat, you get it
It's closely related cousin, Clathrus ruber or Red Cage fungus. Both these friends "hatch" from "eggs" (grow from white spherical bases) that is full of green spore-bearing slime (called gleba)☺️ This friend ALSO smells like rotting meat.
Since we're talking gore, let's check in with hydnellum peckii, the Bleeding Tooth fungus! It "bleeds" bright red guttation droplets that actually has anticoagulant properties similar to heparin! Underneath, it has teeth instead of gills 🦷🦷 Cute!
Our alien-looking pasta fungus is 🍄geomyces pannorum🍄 -- and this lil guy is truly WILD. It's an extremophile, meaning it can survive (and thrive) in conditions that are so extreme we consider them *generally* hostile to life. But not this guy.
G. pannorum is a cryophile/psychrophile, meaning it can survive in *very very cold conditions* like the arctic permafrost, or under a glacier, or antarctic soil 🥶
But it's pretty flexible and lives in soil all over! India or Antarctica, he's probably vibing in the dirt.
They even found it on the rock art (cave paintings) at Lascaux!
It will chow down on mining debris, frozen leaf litter, meat, cod, gelatin, flour, gym floors, books - what won't it eat?
Death caps are the MOST LETHAL mushrooms but scientists might have discovered an antidote and it’s… green dye? Like, the exact same colour as my hair?!?!
Buckle up for a deep dive into the most dangerous mushroom toxin ☠️, CRISPR cell mutations 🧬, antidote research 🧪
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The Death Cap mushroom is the kind of snack you only cronch once. Half a cap is enough to kill -- the main toxin has an LD50 (median lethal dose) of 0.3 mg which is similar to PLUTONIUM ☢️
And according to survivors, they’re pretty tasty. A truly forbidden snack.
Keep in mind, death by mushroom is INCREDIBLY RARE-- in the USA, only 3 ppl a year die by mushroom: you're 20x more likely to be killed by a lawnmower, and 100x more likely to be killed by a ladder. Fear them instead!
There are fungi at Chernobyl that EAT radiation and nuclear fallout – and that’s only the start of this wild story 🍄☢️
Buckle up for a wild thread about radioactive boars, fungal space suits, radiation-detecting fungi, black frogs and a good dose of hope! 🧵
On 26 April 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. It destroyed the containment building and caused a reactor core fire that lasted 8 days, spraying airborne radioactive contaminants throughout the USSR and Europe 😨
People started dying of acute radiation syndrome (ARS) (and the WHO predicts that 9000+ people will die of cancer triggered by this event). They created the Exclusion Zone – a restricted area of 2,600 km2 (1,000 sq mi) around the site where radioactive contamination is highest.
I've been thinking about D&D and the expectations we put on DMs 🧵
The DM "should" keep track of (and/or write) the world & all the NPCs, run combat, create a compelling story AND ALSO *out of game* the DM typically takes on organizational tasks and hosting. It's so much 😭
Some systems are designed to be more collaborative. In Kids on Bikes, the players create the world as much as the GM. In GMless systems, everyone shares the cognitive work equally. But it goes beyond the design, I think, into the culture of D&D.
Often D&D players feel disempowered to add to the world. They seem taken aback when I encourage them to add to the lore, or add to their backstory mid-game. There's an expectation that I've written a game that they are going to play through & they don't want to mess with it.