Green Options

Phallus drewesii, named after Dr. Robert Drewes of the California Academy of Sciences, is a 2 inch long phallus-shaped mushroom that grows on wood, smells like rotting meat and curves awkwardly downward.

Upon discovering that the new species would be named after him, Drewes remarked: “It is a wonderful honour and great fun to have this phallus-shaped fungus named after me. I have been immortalized in the scientific record.”

Honey bees are disappearing. The story has been in the news on and off since 2006, but for one reason or another, most people have paid little attention. And the situation is significantly dire.

New research shows that mushrooms feeding on dead vegetation in soils of northern areas like Alaska and Siberia, eat less and produce less harmful carbon dioxide, when temperatures climb.

When researchers from UC Irvine set out to investigate how climate change was affecting carbon dioxide output by fungi in dryer parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they discovered something altogether surprising, and not at all in line with predictions.

Oftentimes mushrooms feed off of dead vegetation in the soil.  During this process, they emit carbon dioxide that was being stored in that dead matter, into the atmosphere.

Scientists expected warmer than normal soils to emit larger amounts of carbon dioxide because cold temperatures are believed to slow down the process by which fungi convert soil carbon into carbon dioxide.

American scientists have discovered a fungus deep in the Patagonian rainforest that makes biodiesel as part of its natural lifecycle. The fungus is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel sources.

According to team member Prof. Gary Strobel of Montana State University, “The fungus can even make these diesel compounds from cellulose, which would make it a better source of biofuel than anything we use at the moment.”

That fungus among us may be the answer to uranium-polluted soils eventually being brought back into use.

Researchers at Dundee Unversity in the UK have determined that fungi can block uranium from finding its way into plants, animals or the water supply.

Scientists have found that what they call free-living and plant fungi can, “colonise depleted uranium surfaces and transform the metal into uranyl phosphate minerals”.