Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/videos/chernobyl-fungus-eats-nuclear-radiation-via-radiosynthesis-338464

by karimford • 6 years ago

366 104 6 years ago

technologynetworks.com

gpuhacker• 6 years ago

For a nonvideo source of info on this:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

And for a layman digestible version https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-helps-f... (from 2007)

danielheath• 6 years ago

digestible version

Ooh, was wondering if the fungi were good to eat /s

seesawtron2• 6 years ago

> radiation beneath a ≈ 1.7 mm thick lawn of the melanized radiotrophic fungus (180° protection radius) was 2.17±0.35% lower as compared to the negative control.

2% doesn't seem much but again its just from 1.7 mm thick fungus. Wouldn't it be easier to grow it on Earth instead and test with thicker fungus layer for a significant attenuation of the radiation? I understand that they want to use it eventually on the ISS but couldn't the prototype be tested on Earth as well?

dogma11387• 6 years ago

Protomolecule, not good.

jonplackett• 6 years ago

And they just found an ocean on Ceres. Is that in the book?

dogma11387• 6 years ago

No, but the existence of water on Ceres was retconned in the show, now it’s again not accurate since while we discovered it has water between the book and the show we didn’t knew that it had that much water.

garmaine• 6 years ago

No, much of the economic backdrop of the book involves transporting water to Ceres.

Cyphase• 6 years ago

Related discussion, including fun Expanse references:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24113798

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

Ok, but:

1. Is it doable to maintain a 21-cm thick layer of fungus, at all, let alone in space, for a prolonged period of time?

2. Wouldn't it be easier/simpler to replicate this radio-synthesis mechanism in a non-organic setting?

dogma11387• 6 years ago

Is it doable to maintain a 21-cm thick layer of fungus, at all, let alone in space, for a prolonged period of time?

Building a living wall isn’t hard, I have one with moss in my flat it does wonders for air quality (even if not actual one just the smell/perception is enough), fungus is easy to grow - feed it shit and keep it in the dark does work.

Wouldn't it be easier/simpler to replicate this radio-synthesis mechanism in a non-organic setting?

This is pretty much one the hardest things to do in science today, replicating complex biological processes in a non-biological manner.

Insulin while being the first human protein to be synthesized today is still created using biotechnology by using bacteria to manufacture it simply because of how difficult it is to synthesize proteins.

perl4ever• 6 years ago

Insulin while being the first human protein to be synthesized today is still created using biotechnology by using bacteria to manufacture it

An interesting factoid I ran across is where citric acid comes from. I had noticed inexpensive "lemon iced tea" had citric acid listed as an ingredient, and vaguely thought perhaps it's called that just because the citrus source is heavily processed.

Turns out, while citric acid was originally produced on an industrial scale from fruit, circa WWI, due to shortages, Pfizer started making it using microbes, specifically black mold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

But you don't need to replicate the complex biology - just the simple chemistry. Just like a solar panel doesn't replicate photosynthesis.

filoeleven• 6 years ago

On (2): It is often easier to have the organism do it for us.

Fungi are especially good at creating defense compounds like antivirals, antibacterials, and antifungals. This makes sense when you think about how they grow: miles of hyphae in a single square inch, and only one cell wall keeping the inside from the outside.

There are a lot of compounds that we don’t know how to synthesize, or where it’s so costly so as not to be worth it. Compare that to simply feeding a mushroom waste and waiting. Plants work similar wonders with chemistry.

basicplus2• 6 years ago

Why are so many videos using computer generated voice overs?

I find find it a real turn off.

wombatmobile2• 6 years ago

The videos are written, produced, generated and posted by autonomous GPT-3 bots. The first time any human became aware of this video was at the same time you became aware of it, by following the link from HN.

Disclosure: This comment was written by an autonomous GPT-3 bot.

kohtatsu• 6 years ago

I feel like posting GPT generated content should include the prompt a courtesy.

[prompt]For fun, there could be an extension to hide the prompt until you become suspicious and enter the konami code.[/prompt]

ionwake• 6 years ago

Are there any public ally accessible gpt-3 AIs yet?

mulmen• 6 years ago

This happened in a demo at work recently. I couldn't follow along, the robot voice was just too distracting.

In that case I think it was someone insecure in their English skills, which I guess I can understand. I would rather they just do their best and we will make it work. Most of my coworkers are ESL anyway.

If it's really a problem just ask someone else to do the voiceover. The robots are not anywhere close to good enough to do the narration without being incredibly distracting.

DetroitThrow• 6 years ago

In that case I think it was someone insecure in their English skills, which I guess I can understand. I would rather they just do their best and we will make it work. Most of my coworkers are ESL anyway.

I think at this point, I can discern even the thickest of accents if the person were to talk slow because of my (awesome) ESL coworkers, but I'm not sure the average person from my city would be able to do the same with some thick ESL accents. I'd personally prefer the human voice like you, though.

tosh• 6 years ago

a guess: cheaper to produce than other videos & favorably ranked (& chosen by consumers) in search results (vs only text)?

usrusr• 6 years ago

Last minute changes to the content become a bit of a nuisance when the deliverable involves a voice recording, to say the least. A good synthesis pipeline could be set up to re-render the whole thing on a git hook.

vffhfhf• 6 years ago

It used melanin to convert radiation to energy.

Damn.

We are so much alike.

Its kinda funny every living organism in the earth is kinda related to us humans and we to them.

Earth is just a biosphere.

Erlich_Bachman• 6 years ago

Well, we are as much alike as our consciousness/brain can manage to find a pattern for. The consciousness compresses reality by finding patterns. As long as we are able to understand some phenomenon, there will always be a pattern that this understanding is serviced by, and we will be able to see some relation between two different things through that pattern. In that sense, everything we perceive will be connected in one way or another. In that sense, everything is "one".

But does that say anything about the physical world, or rather about our own brains, our consciousness and how it works? A matter of perspective. And of how you define "real".

incidentnormal• 6 years ago

Our ability to leverage those patterns underlies the success of our species, so I would say they are probably quite real.

jorvi• 6 years ago

Fungi and animals actually have a common ancestor, protista. It's not exactly my area of expertise, but I believe that the way a fungus grows its tendrils and communicates over it is much like our nervous system. Here[0] is a fancy graphic that succinctly displays how the kingdoms of life are categorized.

[0]https://biologydictionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tre...

orthoxerox• 6 years ago

Protista is a paraphyletic group of single-celled eukariotes. However, animals and fungi are each other's closest multi-cellular living relatives. Animals are closer to other holozoa, and fungi are closer to other holomycota, but both are equally distant from, for example, Amoebozoa, which includes many other protists.

recuter• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom

ordu• 6 years ago

I attended a course of neurophysiology, and the most stunning thing I've found was that all (or maybe almost all, I don't remember clearly) the neurotransmitters used by a human's neurons exist in a single cellular organisms, even in prokaryotes. Serotonin, glutamat, dopamin and others could be found in bacteria, so bacteria had all the chemistry needed for a central neural system hundreds of millions years ago, and nevertheless it took hunderds of millions years ago to build Einstein's brains.

jbverschoor• 6 years ago

It’s the Access Virus Ti3 Synthesizer

dkdbejwi383• 6 years ago

Ah so that's why Access basically dropped off the face of the Earth, they were trapped in the sarcophagus

DeonPenny• 6 years ago

This is one of the most nature finds a way things I've ever seen

acidburnNSA6• 6 years ago

It shouldn't be too surprising since the universe and earth have been and remain naturally filled with radiation for billions of years. The heat that keeps magma warm in the earth comes 50% from radioactive decay of uranium and its daughters. Life today is based on plants and microorganisms absorbing radiation emanating from a giant nuclear reactor in the sky.

This is just a twist on how it's always been done.

barbegal3• 6 years ago

I am skeptical that this fungus absorbs radiation significantly more than the equivalent amount of water would. The paper [1] isn't very clear about possible inaccuracies in the results and I don't understand why this experiment hasn't been repeated down on Earth. The mass attenuation coefficient of the fungus is 0.234 cm^2/g at 100MeV whereas water is 0.0166 cm^2/g according to this paper [2].

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1....

[2] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a278139.pdf

Edit: I made a mistake in this comment, see child comment for correction.

seesawtron2• 6 years ago

> it could be shown that the melanized fungus C. sphaerospermum can be cultivated in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), while subject to the unique microgravity and radiation environment of the ISS.

I believe this "small scale" experiment was meant as a "proof of concept" to illustrate the idea whether this could be done in house in adverse conditions (unlike Earth's conditions) and could be a potential long term solution for radiation attenuation. I would hope that these somewhat promising results would allow them to conduct a large scale experiment.

barbegal3• 6 years ago

Reading the paper again, I made a mistake in my comment above. The mass attenuation coefficient was at 10keV not 100MeV. Water has a mass attenuation coefficient of about 5cm^2/g at 10keV.

Table 1 [1] in the paper shows the true comparison with water at 100 MeV where it can be seen that there is not a large difference. On a weight basis stainless steel outperforms the fungus.

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1....

Hnrobert42• 6 years ago

Maybe it’s because you have to ship stainless steel from Earth. Maybe the mass of the fungus can be grown from CO2 from respiration. The carbon originally coming from food, which has to be shipped up. Lots of maybes, but you know, maybe...

rch• 6 years ago

I wonder if material degradation factors like neutron embrittlement would tip the scales in favor of a fungal barrier at longer timescales.

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

still worth for the conversion of radiative energy to biological activity

nuclear waste may become green :)

barbegal3• 6 years ago

Not really, almost all the radiation is converted to heat just like in any shielding material.

acidburnNSA6• 6 years ago

Well technically it already is pretty darn green in that the energy system concentrates its waste into tiny generally well-contained packages that have, per TWh generated, a relatively miniscule negative impact and footprint on the biosphere.

I recognize this is controversial but the numbers are pretty solid.

adontz• 6 years ago

Is not it how Godzilla works?

blickentwapft• 6 years ago

You know where this leads?

The blob. A 1959s sci fi horror movie in which a radioactive fungus takes over the world.

If not today then very soon.

ksaj• 6 years ago

I think this speaks to a common fear of technology taking over and incidentally/consequentially killing everyone. Like the Terminator series, and many others as well. IRL you might recall the torrents of fearful articles and posts about the world being consumed by a human-triggered black hole when they started building the massive colliders. And every few years, someone predicts AI will do us in. And HAARP killing us with bad weather and earthquakes. So many examples abound.

YeGoblynQueenne• 6 years ago

> Scientists are thinking of shielding astronauts and space objects with a layer of this radiation-absorbing protective fungus.

This reminds me of Adam Stone's discovery in Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live in Vain [1]:

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

Adam Stone has basically discovered that the radiation that causes the Great Pain of Space not only affects life, it is absorbed by it. So, surrounding yourself with other living creatures will prevent you from feeling the pain yourself. He eventually settles on building a shield out of live oysters, since they lack any central nervous system to experience pain with.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ScannersLi...

END SPOILER ALERT

_____________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain

taneq• 6 years ago

Yes! Ever since I read that I’ve caught myself thinking of cosmic radiation as ‘the pain of space’.

Nursie• 6 years ago

Haha, yes that was the first thing that popped into my head too.

I remember thinkig how ridiculous (but entertaining) an idea that was, like many of his very unusual thoughts. Maybe not so crazy after all!

Method5440• 6 years ago

Interesting - how haven’t I heard about that story? I immediately thought about how Rick covers his outpost in screaming Mortys so that the galactic government can’t detect him. Morty pain as anti-Rick is a strange, appealing and disturbing thought... they’re effectively oysters soaking up the pain of the universe.

RichardCA• 6 years ago

When I was in High School I had a teacher who taught a Literature of SF class.

Every single short story in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 was required reading.

I remain thankful to that teacher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fa...

freeflight• 6 years ago

Interestingly enough this resilience of fungus, and even mold [0], to radiation has been a bit of a problem on the ISS [1].

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190627121252.h...

[1] https://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/2019/11/01/mold-space-nas...

burtonator• 6 years ago

There's simply no way that this type of fungus could absorb enough radiation simply because it's not dense enough.

If you want to absorb radiation you have to block it which means it has to come into contact with matter.

The only way you can do this is to have either a smaller volumetric amount of something that's dense (lead, gold, uranium, etc) or a LARGE amount of something less dense (water, concrete, etc).

If you're just talking about an organic organism, sure, it can use the radiation BUT you'd need to have a MASSIVE amount of it in terms of volume and weight.

Simply put, the fungus itself is sparse when looking at it from a subatomic perspective. Most of the radiation passes right through it.

jojobas• 6 years ago

Absorbtion is a misnomer.

It uses a tiny fraction of energy of whatever particle it is. In terms of attenuation it cant be different from anything else of similar density and composition.

acidburnNSA6• 6 years ago

But then why this seemingly-ridiculous line from the article?

Scientists are thinking of shielding astronauts and space objects with a layer of this radiation-absorbing protective fungus.

DarthGhandi• 6 years ago

Given we are taking about space here I'm quite sure water outperforms per kg compared to the others you've mentioned.

Fairly certain there's no high-Z solid that could compete on cost to orbit.

chongli• 6 years ago

I think the whole framing of this discussion is inappropriate. The interesting thing about this fungus is that it can use the radiation as an energy source to sustain life. The fact that we can’t use the fungus as some kind of miracle lightweight radiation shield is missing the point.

Here we have a life form that has adapted to make use of a very unusual (on earth’s surface, anyway) energy source. That should not be taken for granted. It’s an amazing demonstration of the adaptability of life. It also warrants a deeper investigation into how this ability works and how it came about by evolutionary processes.

eloff• 6 years ago

Agreed, lead blocks radiation quite well. I don't know why anyone would care about that property in a fungus. What is fascinating is that life evolved a novel energy pathway here, this is like photosynthesis but with gamma radiation. I'd love to know more about it.

specialist• 6 years ago

"It’s an amazing demonstration of the adaptability of life."

Ya. Just as awesome as chemosynthetic life forms adapted for hydrothermal vents.

It's hard not to be dumb stuck.

raverbashing3• 6 years ago

Density blocks radiation but it's the "hard way" of doing it

It's better to have something that resonates in the frequencies you want to block.

Given that melanin already works in the UV range it's not surprising that maybe with some changes it works with higher frequencies (though not too trivial neither because of the way quantum physics work)

acidburnNSA6• 6 years ago

I work in ionizing radiation transport. We use materials with high electron densities to shield gamma rays. Should we be using a material that "resonates" with gamma rays instead? If so could you provide an example of this working on gamma rays?

qubex5• 6 years ago

What’s astonishing is not the ability to block radiation (after all, biology will always defer to chemistry first, and physics second—there’s no way biology can come up with something that exceeds the capabilities of its substrates) but rather life’s way of rapidly adapting to make use of whichever energy source it can find to eke out an energy budget to thrive on.

P.S. Who else heard Dr Ian Malcom say “Life... finds a way” in their head?

walleeee2• 6 years ago

Life can't exceed the capabilities of its substrates on their own terms, but it's not clear that life can be fully explained in or reduced to those terms either.

Anyways, yes, this is super cool.

qubex5• 6 years ago

I’m glad you made this point, because it allows me to issue a cautionary word to those dualists who think that somehow the mind is something disjoint from the brain.

raven105x• 6 years ago

On the contrary, I’d argue that most “life” (in the sense of our Eucledian definition of it) relies on exceeding the capabilities of its substrates via emergent properties - at least from the perspective of our current infantile understanding of the universe. Photosynthesis is so efficient because electrons jump multi-molecule gaps due to quantum effects, as we’ve found only a few years ago. The theory that most biological brains heavily leverage quantum processes is rapidly gaining ground as well - we simply lack the intelligence and processing capacity to design anything like it, since compared to our current computational abilities, millions of years worth of entropy may as well be an infinite amount.

Reductionism fails as completely as it does hilariously when it comes to systems where the whole does indeed exceed the sum of its parts due to laws of the universe we have yet to grasp. A much more sane approach is to think of the matter something is comprised of as nothing more than a filter/transformer for the entropy and environment it exists within. Life routinely harnesses entropy whereas our current technology is so ass backwards it does little but struggle against it (dendrites in batteries, for example). What science considers to be degradation or wear and tear is the very process living things rely on to exist - let that sink in.

qubex5• 6 years ago

I think you’ve missed my point entirely: the jumping of electrons that makes photosynthesis “so efficient” (which it isn’t—as a recent post here mentioned, it’s tuned for stability) is not in defiance of the laws of physics, but entirely compatible with them.

Only density can attenuate nuclear radiation, that’s the fundamental physical intuition here (which is also absent from the article/video posted). Nothing “merely biological” is going to change that. Now, making use of some of the energy that is attenuated by the non-dense biological medium... thta’s entirely within the biological domain.

gus_massa• 6 years ago

Photosynthesis is so efficient because electrons jump multi-molecule gaps due to quantum effects, as we’ve found only a few years ago.

That's true, but is a short lived and very local effect.

The theory that most biological brains heavily leverage quantum processes is rapidly gaining ground as well [...]

No, there is only some handwaving. It's impossible to keep the quantum coherence in a system that weight 1.5kg at 310K.

BurningFrog• 6 years ago

Earth has always been radioactive, so my guess is that this is an ancient ability rarely used/seen, not something that evolved since 1986.

Tade0• 6 years ago

Is the fungus edible?

bobhel• 6 years ago

Here's the real question. Or, can it be made edible? Cultivating something like this on Mars out in the open makes more sense than growing potatoes indoors.

dogma11387• 6 years ago

Even if it’s not directly edible it can be a source of amino acids and proteins that could be then processed into something edible or be a source of food for other things that provide better nutritional value to humans like yeast.

The question is it going to be more cost effective than hydroponics.

tyingq• 6 years ago

There's a movie plot that's fairly adjacent to this and even has pretty good ratings: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7425298/

ulmas• 6 years ago

I'm actually surprised this cheaply written two paragraph article with no references is being discussed here.

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

Two words:

Mars Mission.

Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

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