More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 17 - February 11, 2023
Researchers at the Unconventional Computing Lab at the University of the West of England have used slime moulds to calculate efficient fire evacuation routes from buildings.
Olsson had been studying was the bitter oyster, Panellus stipticus. ‘You could read in the light of it when I grew it in jars,’ he told me. ‘It was like a little lamp standing on the shelf at home. My kids loved it.’
Olsson had been studying was the bitter oyster, Panellus stipticus. ‘You could read in the light of it when I grew it in jars,’ he told me. ‘It was like a little lamp standing on the shelf at home. My kids loved it.’
only a single cell thick – between two and twenty micrometres in diameter, over five times thinner than an average human hair.
only a single cell thick – between two and twenty micrometres in diameter, over five times thinner than an average human hair.
At a molecular level, all cellular activity, whether fungal or not, is a blur of rapid activity. Even by these standards, hyphal tips are a commotion, busier than a court of 10,000 self-dribbling basketballs.
Hyphal tips must lay down new material as they advance. Small bladders filled with cellular building materials arrive at the tip from within, and fuse with it at a rate of up to 600 a second.
‘We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.’
When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in its continual development.
they rapidly inflate with water, which they must absorb from their surroundings – the reason why mushrooms tend to appear after rain.
How do brainless organisms link perception with action?
given mycelial network might have anywhere between hundreds and billions of hyphal tips, all integrating and processing information on a massively parallel basis.
The mycelium of some fungal species grows into ‘fairy rings’ that stretch across hundreds of metres, reach hundreds of years in age, and then somehow produce a circle of mushrooms in a synchronised flush.
Some researchers suggest that mycelial networks might transmit developmental cues using changes in pressure or flow – because mycelium is a continuous hydraulic network like a car’s braking system, a sudden change in pressure in one part could, in principle, be felt rapidly everywhere
When Olsson inserted the microelectrodes into Armillaria’s hyphal strands, he detected regular action potential-like impulses, firing at a rate very close to that of animals’ sensory neurons – around four impulses per second, which travelled along hyphae at a speed of at least half a millimetre per second, some ten times faster than the fastest rate of fluid flow measured in a fungal hypha. This caught his attention, but in itself it didn’t suggest that impulses formed the basis of a rapid signalling system. Electrical activity can only play a role in fungal communication if it is sensitive to
...more
The idea that a neat line can be drawn that separates non-humans from humans with ‘real minds’ and ‘real comprehension’ has been curtly dismissed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett as an ‘archaic myth’.
Some use the term ‘swarm intelligence’ to describe the problem-solving behaviour of brainless systems.
argue that the question we should ask is not whether an organism has cognition or not. Rather, we should assess the degree to which an organism might be cognisant.
Flatworms are well-studied model organisms because of their ability to regenerate. If the head of a flatworm is cut off, it sprouts another head, brain and all. Flatworms can also be trained. The researchers wondered whether, if they trained a flatworm to remember features of its environment and then cut off its head, it would retain the memory when it had grown a new head and brain. Remarkably, the answer is yes.
Most nerves in octopuses are not found in the brain, for instance, but are distributed throughout their bodies. A large number are found in the tentacles, which can explore and taste their surroundings without involving the brain. Even when amputated, tentacles are able to reach and grasp.42
the fossils date from 2.4 billion years ago, more than a billion years before fungi were thought to have branched off the tree of life.
In their relationship, both partners were able to make a life in places where neither could survive alone.4
Lichens encrust as much as 8 per cent of the planet’s surface, an area larger than that covered by tropical rainforests.
First, they physically break up surfaces by the force of their growth. Second, they deploy an arsenal of powerful acids and mineral-binding compounds to digest the rock. Lichens’ ability to weather makes them a geological force,
When lichens die and decompose, they give rise to the first soils in new ecosystems. Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks is able to cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living.
A portion of the minerals in your body is likely to have passed through a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Lichen samples exposed to 6 kilograys of gamma irradiation – six times the standard dose for food sterilisation in the United States, and 12,000 times the lethal dose for humans – were entirely untroubled.
When the dose was doubled to 12 kilograys – 2.5 times the lethal dose for tardigrades – the lichens’ ability to reproduce was impaired, although they survived and continued to photosynthesise with no apparent problems.20
The cells of some insects, for example, are inhabited by bacteria that themselves contain bacteria.24
Dehydration also protects them from the most hazardous consequence of cosmic rays: highly reactive free radicals, produced when radiation cleaves water molecules in two, that damage the structure of DNA.
The hardiest lichen species have thick layers of tissue that block damaging rays. Lichens also produce more than a thousand chemicals that are not found in any other life forms, some of which act as sunscreens.
lichen is one of the principal ingredients in the spice mix garam masala.
The tolerances of extremophiles are inconceivable. Collect samples in volcanic springs or superheated hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and you’ll find extremophilic microbes living apparently unfazed.
Recent findings from the Deep Carbon Observatory report that more than half of all Earth’s bacteria and archaea – so called ‘infra-terrestrials’ – exist kilometres below the planet’s surface, where they live under intense pressure and extreme heat.
These subsurfac...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
contain billions of tonnes of microbes, hundreds of times the collective weight of all...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Some specimens are thousands o...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In the hottest, driest parts of the world’s deserts, you’ll find lichens prospering as crusts on the scorched ground. Lichens play a critical ecological role in these environments, stabilising the sandy surface of deserts, reducing dust storms and preventing further desertification.
The authors of one study, reporting the presence of lichens within chunks of granite, confess that they have no idea how these lichens got there in the first place.
Several species of lichen are able to make a runaway success of life in the Antarctic Dry Valleys – an ecosystem so fierce it is used to approximate conditions on Mars. Long periods of freezing temperatures, irradiation with high lev...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Even after immersion in liquid nitrogen at –195 degrees Centigrade li...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The record-holding lichen lives in Swedish Lapland and is ov...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In 2007, researchers demonstrated that lichens could withstand shock waves with a pressure of 10–50 gigapascals, 100–500 times greater than the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth.
In 2007, samples of bacteria and a rock-dwelling lichen were attached to the heat shield of a re-entry capsule. As the capsule scorched through the Earth’s atmosphere, the samples were exposed to temperatures of over 2,000 degrees Centigrade for thirty seconds. In the process, the rocks partially melted and crystallised into new forms. When the remains were examined, there was no sign of any living cell whatsoever.36
The earliest fossils date from just over 400 million years ago,
Lichens have evolved independently between nine and twelve times since.
one in five of all known fungal species...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
it is no longer possible to conceive of any organism – humans included – as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with.
at least 8 per cent of the human genome originated in viruses
these chemicals powerful medicines capable of relieving severe addictive behaviours, otherwise incurable depression and the existential distress that can follow the diagnosis of terminal illness.
