We share our bodies with countless bacteria, viruses, and even fungi of which we have little or no awareness. The undersides of shrubs, the cracks in pavement and asphalt, the plumbing and crawl-spaces and back walls of cabinets in our homes, all provide spacious habitats for such invisble life. We walk through the world thinking of ourselves as ( Read more... )

http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/1105/mushrooms_cleanup.html

What if the solutions to cleaning up the most daunting 21st century disasters - such as oil spills and radioactivity from nuclear reactors - involved mushrooms? What if an unorthodox fungi ( Read more... )

If you put Obama in the dark and fed him lots of shit, would he turn into the Fungus of Doom?

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/110615_spongiforma

What lives in the rain­for­est, un­der a tree? Spon­gi­for­ma square­pant­sii, a new spe­cies of mush­room al­most as odd as the car­toon char­ac­ter sci­en­tists named it af­ter.

I've been reading Michael Gruber's Tropic of Night, a stunningly good novel of suspense. On pages 80-81 I encountered the following, part of a lecture given to a college audience by anthropologist Marcel Vierchau ( Read more... )

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/11/floridas-bestiality-law_n_860836.htmlRead more... )

Okay, back on program: Here's more about Colony Collapse Disorder. (I know, I know -- I promised some time back to have more on that "shortly," but several things intervened: my cat died; I have other books in the toilet-tank stack to read, and they got in the way; I had the flu or something of the sort for two months, and nearly hacked my ( Read more... )

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If, as many believe, we have been visited by beings from worlds beyond the Solar System, how, in the vast reaches of interstellar space, did they find us? How did they recognize the Solar System harbored complex life -- life that might a technologically advanced civilization potentially capable of reaching the stars? For years, the organization ( Read more... )