I was thinking the same thing. That one accelerates its growth in the presence of radiation. But it also seeks out human flesh and brains to build its biomass intelligence blob, unfortunately.
In the books, it is suggested (if not stated outright) that the protomolecule was probably intended to work with much simpler forms of life, but is also able to make use of higher forms like humans.
The reason so many were infected on Eros was because humans deliberately infected everyone on the station. Likewise with the human/protomolecule hybrids.
I think the Martian was adapted well from book to movie, so I have hope for this one. That said, compressing the entire story into a theatre runtime is tricky: I think it would be a win if only half of the character and relationship growth of the two ship bound protagonists comes through in the adaptation (because it was sooo good in the book!)
True - but I think that might make the adaptation to a movie easier, not harder.
Like GP said, I think the trick to this book is in the relationship between the 2 main characters, so hopefully they nail that. Judging by the trailer they made it all quite humorous.
I know they have to peak interest, but man, so many spoilers in the 2 trailers. They look amazing, clearing a huge budget and I hope a solid adaptation… sad for people that don’t know the story to miss out on the reveals.
But the half life of the atoms is still the same, no? The bacteria and fungi harness the radioactivity, but it’s not that they “get rid” of the radioactive material.
I don't think they claim the mold removes radioactive material, but that it absorbs a high amount radiation since it's producing so much melanin, and seems to be fine. Since it's absorbing so much, it works like a radiation shield, kind of like lead.
So "eat" was a bit of a poetic choice for the title really haha. It "eats" energy. Pretty good deal for the mold considering the radiation is going to be produced whether they "eat" it or not, for a VERY long time!
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read about this fungus. Let us grant the premise of a fungus somehow harnessing ionizing radiation using melanin; such a fungus could in principle be used to shield radioactive sources, but it won't "eat it up"; the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid of them, only incorporate them. Neither chemical nor any kind of biological process can make radioactive isotopes stop being radioactive, you need some sort of nuclear process to do that. The absolute best the fungus could do is bind up the radioactive isotopes to aid in their collection, but epoxy resins sprayed over the contaminated areas are far more effective than that could ever be.
Also, making spacecraft shielding and even furniture out of this stuff? It's the stupidest thing I ever heard. The mass of the fungus doesn't come from ionizing radiation anymore than the mass of a plant comes from sunlight. You might as well claim that you're going to grow trees in space using the abundant sunlight. They power themselves with light but still need to be made out of something! Are they also hoping these fungus like to eat lunar regolith? It makes zero sense, but here we've got the BBC and apparently NASA taking the idea seriously. Where is the fucking biomass meant to come from?? I must be crazy, or they all are.
In regards of NASA taking it seriously, my null hypothesis would be that reporters misunderstand NASA just as much as everything else about fungi.
If I understand the linked NASA press releases correctly, they are talking about using a mix of regolith, cyanobacteria and fungi as part of the outer shell of a habitat. The mycelian network of the fungi binds the loose regolith together, forming a strong and somewhat flexible material, with the fungus working a bit like the cement in a concrete mix. And because fungi don't form from nothing you add cyanobacteria that create "fungus food" (presumably some sugar) from water and CO2 (I'm sure you need to add a bit more than that, but that might be beyond the scope of a press release)
This really has nothing to do with radiation-absorbing fungi at all, except for one remark how the melanin in radiation-eating fungi could provide further shielding.
>the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid of them
Please excuse the novice question but I am confused, where does the energy come from then?
Granting the premise, the fungus gets energy (but not mass) from the natural decay of radioactive particles. It doesn't accelerate that decay, the decay happens at the same pace it would have without the fungus. Just like planting more plants doesn't make the sun burn out any faster. The fungus itself is made of carbon and all the other usual stuff life is made from.
What if the fungus accumulated radioactive particles in vesicles? Might they create chained reactions and thus deplete the radioactivity faster than spatially separated particles? Might that be plausible?
Theoretically yes, as long as the isotopes are themselves fissile and susceptible to chain reactions. E.g. U-235 is (obviously, since it's fission reactor fuel) but, say, Iodine-131 undergoes beta decay. That electron can't get into another I-131 atom and cause another decay there like neutrons do in U-325. So piling up I-131 won't get it going faster.
In principle if fungi could somehow concentrate enough fissionable material (say uranium), you could get something like the Oklo reactor going, but it would have to be a truly gigantic, probably unphysical amount of fungi to have access to that much environmental uranium in the first place and it would then have to be concentrated very strongly to get any measurable effect. You won't see anything at all if you just move a few atoms a few mm, so it would need to have very long range hyphae. You also need it to be basically one huge organism in order to collect the uranium to one place - billions of small fungi just doing a few square inches each won't work. It's unlikely the fungus could survive to become so huge on only the promise of fractionally higher future radiation, so it would need to eat something else too.
And then it would decay into daughter isotopes that don't further benefit from the concentration so it might not help a lot anyway if you're looking for cleanup. Plus you've covered your cleanup site in, presumably, millions of tonnes of fungus which might or might not be an improvement.
Not really. You're talking about a fungus creating essentially a nuclear reactor inside of its cells, and creating it out of fuel that's not good enough to make a nuclear reactor in the first place (it at one time was, but now it's a mess of decay products and nonsense).
Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
Melanin is used as a solar panel, capturing gamma rays and then passing the resulting consistent flow of excited electrons over to the Krebs cycle with the help of CO2; like in photosynthesis. Humans run on electrons resulting from Krebs cycle as well, just the input is different. By using it as shielding, you'd simply decrease the amount of ionizing radiation hitting humans inside the spaceship. In other words, it would be better than some static material as it consumes part of incoming radiation for its own existence.
I mean... you're completely right and some of the stuff is as ridiculous as you're suggesting (e.g. the furniture). However... what we're agreeing on is that the fungus is absorbing alpha/beta particles and gamma rays that are coming off the radioactive material, which in theory should mean that it would act as a radiation shield. Whether it's a more effective radiation shield than other options is the big question, and for space travel in particular the question I'd want to know is how effective is a given mass of this fungus relative to other options (e.g. water).
Something the fungus COULD do (in a hypothetical world) is concentrate radioisotopes along with some moderator to accelerate the fission process and harvest more energy.
Would probably require a lot more time than it would have, however, considering the relatively low amounts of radioisotopes in todays world (due to the halflife of most of them, and the age of our planet).
Several billion years ago it could have been a thing though!
Maybe in principle, but neutron radiation from fallout/etc is relatively minimal and you really just have to wait out the decay of those isotopes.
The good news is radiation detectors are insanely sensitive so you can map where the hotspots are and mitigate much of the risk using exclusion zones and / or various cleanup techniques to collect the radioactive material so it can be safety stored.
But if it concentrates isotopes to accellerate fission, wouldn't that cause the material to heat up and, ultimately, kill the fungus? Depends on rate of concentration of course, if it just grabs the odd airborne isotope (if that's a thing) then maybe.
All living organisms have this problem - people who can’t sweat/are in environments with no effective evaporation die, piles of leaves with fungus can heat up so much they catch on fire and burn, etc.
Most life has evolved some sort of mechanism to control it, but sometimes it doesn’t work right.
If such a fungus existed and we had enough radioactive material lying around for it to survive, I’d expect the occasional random meltdown to occur.
I wonder if you could power something of this? If the fungus have some type of melanin that will turn ionized radiation into energy, could we then use that to power something of background radiation?
Also interesting to see how close this fungi will grow to the radiation source, or will it be able to mutate to completely envelop the radiation source.
Just dry the fungus and burn it. The process is fairly analogous to photosynthesis in plants, so we've basically already been doing this since we learned to make fire, just with a different source of radiation.
I don't understand why the nuclear industry wouldn't pile in to fund research into this area (as a potential way to clean up nuclear waste). Probably I don't understand how this fungus actually works and it is impossible!
As mentioned elsethread, it doesn't actually clean up anything, since it doesn't affect the waste at all, just turns some of the radiation into metabolism in the same way that plants turn solar radiation into metabolism.
Even if it did somehow accelerate the decay, it wouldn't be that useful, since (Chernobyl aside), all the waste from the typical civilian nuclear reactor can fit in a side lot on the site of the reactor complex itself (and often does!). There just isn't that much radioactive waste to clean up!
Yeah waste has been a red herring that anti nuclear people like to bring up. Yes it’s nasty stuff but there isn’t that much of it and it can be buried or reprocessed it’s not a real problem.
Low level waste is an expensive pain in the buttocks. I toured a local medical and research reactor back in highschool, and they were running out of space to store their discarded PPE and other minimally contaminated waste. You could probably empty most of the barrels on the floor and roll in the contents without any noticeable effect, and yet they still needed to be treated like real waste, just in case.
Not to disagree with you, just to say that even though it's a minor nuisance it nevertheless occupies a lot of mental space because of how annoying it is.
I don’t see a straightforward way this would actually help with the cleanup. A hypothetical microbe that “eats” oil would be useful in an oil spill as would chemically break down the oil and harvest its carbon.
A radiotropic fungus that’s in TFA can’t meaningfully affect the rate at which nuclear decay is happening. What it can do, supposedly, is to harvest the energy that the nuclear decay is releasing; normally there’s too much energy for an organism to safely handle.
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, you can’t plug your phone into high voltage transmission lines. These fungi are using melanin to moderate the extra energy, stepping it down into a range that’s useful (or at least minimally harmful).
I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra.
- If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture
- That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material.
- Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial ≈ 3.15 kJ
10% of that is 315 J per gram
The result is that:
The amount of radiation energy available is 4 orders of magnitude too small
to power even a 10% growth boost.
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.
They don't eat the radioactive material and make it not radioactive.
[Assuming they use the radiation to get energy [1].] They just wait patiently until the radioactive atoms decay and emit radiation, like a gamma ray, and then absorb the gamma ray and use the energy. The half life of the radioactive material does not change.
[1] I still doubt this claim, but let's go along assuming the best case.
I'm trying to work out how the fungus evolves to grow its food source by causing radioactivity increase?
It can concentrate radionuclides, but the step function after inducing some criticality is likely to cause reproductive difficulty (stopping fungus evolution).
Plus: heavy metals combined with organics have a tendency towards being nasty poisonous
I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.
I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.
But as they say, writing is hard. :)
My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.
I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.
There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.
I had a similar thought, ideas are cheap. Loads of people are like "I have this GREAT idea for an app, I just need a developer to build it!"... as if the idea on its own has value.
Unfortunately and / or fortunately thanks to AI tech, anyone with an idea can now throw it at an AI and see it materialise.
Consider when organisms must pass, that these ancient fungi likely still consume the host... Thus, on a 8000 year timescale most fungi doesn't necessarily need to pursue food that naturally dies in around a century.
Yeasts are already sharing your body along with numerous other organisms that are often harmless or even beneficial. Best not think about it too much if you are uncomfortable with seeing yourself as a mini ecosystem. =3
rivals the aspen grove "Pando" as the known organism with the highest living biomass and perhaps rivalled by a colony of Posidonia australis on the Australian seabed that measures 200 square kilometres (edited)
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete.
For example:
> Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial
based on what?
Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.
If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.
The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"
You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.
> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).
> It was really just food for thought.
It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.
Um right did not think of that, if you burn a organism you get to core components but the organism was not originally made of the core components.
The core idea was not generated from a chat bot. Neither was the article i gave (that was my own googling).
The core idea (that there is a requirement and a availability of energy that may differ) was generated from my brain not that i personally think the origin of an idea matters to its value.
General rule of thumb: If you're going to ask an LLM and then make a post based on that, simply don't post it. If we wanted a randomly generated take on this, we would just ask an LLM ourselves.
Another hypothesis to test would be if the radiation is being used as a catalyst somehow.
E.g. Could be denaturing something else, unlocking a previously inaccessible energy source. Possibly some radiochemistry creating a new food source for the fungus too.
I also did some back of the envelope calculations. Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law). Now, the radiation from the elephant foot has decreased significantly. I couldn't find a recent estimate, but I would expect it to be at least 100 times lower. So at 100 meters from the elephant foot, the radiation level is a billion times lower than what you get from the sun. There's no way any organism can "feed" on that.
> Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law).
No, the elephants foot isn’t a point source at its surface.
To use an extreme example going from 1m away from the sun to 100m away from the sun doesn’t result in a 10,000x drop off in energy density. Instead the exponential drop-off occurs relative to the center of the sun because energy is coming from any point on the surface visible to that location. A similar principle applies with the elephants foot, though the geometry is more complicated.
I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.
I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concrete.
As to a point source, if you’re making an approximation use the center of the object and your 100m distance calculation would be corrected by about 25x. Though obviously the building itself provides shielding.
I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower.
In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun, and therefore fungi can't "feed" on it, because this energy is nowhere near enough to sustain life?
> Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun
Yes, the elephants foot is not the only radiation source at Chernobyl making your calculation meaningless in practice.
You’re making such a huge range of incorrect assumptions here and I was trying to correct some of them. I’m honestly done with this conversation but it’s worth remembering that order of magnitude calculates can be off by 100,000 fold when you make the wrong assumptions.
Also, Wikipedia itself says the reading was from 8 months after the accident. “At the time of its discovery, about eight months after formation, radioactivity near the Elephant's Foot was” The falloff from 8 months post accident to now isn’t actually that large because even iodine 131 had already seen 30 half lives at that point the really nasty stuff was already gone and the reasonably long lived stuff is what was left.
Finally, fungi get by on way less energy than plants do from photosynthesis it’s really not a particularly meaningful benchmark.
> That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material
Over what timeframe? If that’s 0.05 J per hour and “the researchers found that fungi that faced the galactic cosmic radiation for 26 days grew an average 1.21 times faster” 26 * 25 / 21% and the numbers don’t look that unreasonable.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.
>The increase in biomass and other effects could be caused either by the cells directly deriving energy from ionizing radiation, or by the radiation allowing the cells to utilize traditional nutrients either more efficiently or more rapidly
It has not actually been proven that this fungus gets energy from the radiation itself. They simply observe it growing faster in the presence of radiation which could be caused by any number of other things.
Interesting that it uses melanin to survive, I wonder if studying it in the context of vitiligo would reveal anything given vitiligo is not well understood generally.
Ionizing (or ionising) radiation is particle or photon that has enough energy to detaching electron from atoms or molecules. It includes all the usual high energy radiations such as Gamma, X-rays, high energy UV, alpha, beta, neutron et al. HN high energy physicists can correct me, sounds like it is not any particular category of the harmful radiation from a nuclear disaster, it is all of them.
I was immediately reminded of Hayao Miyazaki's post-apocalyptic manga and anime film, "Nausicaa of the valley of the winds", where the fungus-and-spore-filled jungle, toxic and lethal to humans, actually serves as a sequestering and purification agent for the ecosystems affected by some apocalyptic, possibly nuclear, catastrophe.
Given we can't solve our black mold problem, might as well tell ourselves we're in symbiosis with it. It's our radiation shielding, see. That, and cactuses. Truly the science of winning.
> Zhdanova suspected that the melanin of these fungi was acting as a shield against ionising radiation.
Wouldn't that be very easy to measure? My guts tell me that using the melanin as a shield against gamma radiation has a negligible effect, if any at all.
You are assuming a molecule good at shielding against UV light is probably a poor shield against gamma rays, many orders of magnitude shorter wavelength. That sounds probable ...
But how about the theory that systems to clean up smashed up proteins from UV light is also good to clean up smashed up proteins from gamma radiation?
And one of the parts of that system, or upregulated with that system, is melanin.
I'm skeptical just because I know someone who has been working on the problem of radioactivity for like 30 years and they have left no stone unturned in that undertaking.
Related:
"Fungus in Chernobyl nuclear disaster zone has mutated to 'feed' on radiation (2024)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901149 12-nov-2025
"Fungus found in Chernobyl might process radiation and act as a shield (2024)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43534021 31-mar-2025
"A Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl by Drinking Radiation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43148355 23-feb-2025
"Radiotrophic fungus" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41085406 03-aug-2024
"Chernobyl fungus could shield astronauts from cosmic radiation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35181146 16-mar-2023
"Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166994 15-aug-2020
"Radiotrophic fungus" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342750 03-jul-2019
"Chernobyl Fungus Feeds On Radiation (2007)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6763520 19-nov-2013
"Black Fungus Found in Chernobyl Eats Harmful Radiation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127626 02-mar-2008
This would be a cool origin story for astrophage (from Project Hail Mary, a fun & light sci fi read by the Martian guy)
Also this is how the protomolecile from The Expanse feeds. It can absorb pretty much any radiation across the whole spectrum.
I was thinking the same thing. That one accelerates its growth in the presence of radiation. But it also seeks out human flesh and brains to build its biomass intelligence blob, unfortunately.
In the books, it is suggested (if not stated outright) that the protomolecule was probably intended to work with much simpler forms of life, but is also able to make use of higher forms like humans.
The reason so many were infected on Eros was because humans deliberately infected everyone on the station. Likewise with the human/protomolecule hybrids.
There is a movie coming with Ryan Gosling, I sure hope they keep the spirit of the book and don't turn that into some bizarre hollywoodish cash grab
I think the Martian was adapted well from book to movie, so I have hope for this one. That said, compressing the entire story into a theatre runtime is tricky: I think it would be a win if only half of the character and relationship growth of the two ship bound protagonists comes through in the adaptation (because it was sooo good in the book!)
The Martian was well adapted as the story has an attention to scientific details, can’t say that for Project Hail Mary
True - but I think that might make the adaptation to a movie easier, not harder.
Like GP said, I think the trick to this book is in the relationship between the 2 main characters, so hopefully they nail that. Judging by the trailer they made it all quite humorous.
The audiobook narrated by Ray Porter is also really good.
In fact, it's so good that it sets a really good example of what an enjoyable experience listening to an audiobook can be.
I know they have to peak interest, but man, so many spoilers in the 2 trailers. They look amazing, clearing a huge budget and I hope a solid adaptation… sad for people that don’t know the story to miss out on the reveals.
Andy Weir is a producer on this one. The trailer looks good (with spoilers)
That Oasis tune in the 2nd trailer already ruined everything for me.
But the half life of the atoms is still the same, no? The bacteria and fungi harness the radioactivity, but it’s not that they “get rid” of the radioactive material.
I don't think they claim the mold removes radioactive material, but that it absorbs a high amount radiation since it's producing so much melanin, and seems to be fine. Since it's absorbing so much, it works like a radiation shield, kind of like lead.
So "eat" was a bit of a poetic choice for the title really haha. It "eats" energy. Pretty good deal for the mold considering the radiation is going to be produced whether they "eat" it or not, for a VERY long time!
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read about this fungus. Let us grant the premise of a fungus somehow harnessing ionizing radiation using melanin; such a fungus could in principle be used to shield radioactive sources, but it won't "eat it up"; the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid of them, only incorporate them. Neither chemical nor any kind of biological process can make radioactive isotopes stop being radioactive, you need some sort of nuclear process to do that. The absolute best the fungus could do is bind up the radioactive isotopes to aid in their collection, but epoxy resins sprayed over the contaminated areas are far more effective than that could ever be.
Also, making spacecraft shielding and even furniture out of this stuff? It's the stupidest thing I ever heard. The mass of the fungus doesn't come from ionizing radiation anymore than the mass of a plant comes from sunlight. You might as well claim that you're going to grow trees in space using the abundant sunlight. They power themselves with light but still need to be made out of something! Are they also hoping these fungus like to eat lunar regolith? It makes zero sense, but here we've got the BBC and apparently NASA taking the idea seriously. Where is the fucking biomass meant to come from?? I must be crazy, or they all are.
In regards of NASA taking it seriously, my null hypothesis would be that reporters misunderstand NASA just as much as everything else about fungi.
If I understand the linked NASA press releases correctly, they are talking about using a mix of regolith, cyanobacteria and fungi as part of the outer shell of a habitat. The mycelian network of the fungi binds the loose regolith together, forming a strong and somewhat flexible material, with the fungus working a bit like the cement in a concrete mix. And because fungi don't form from nothing you add cyanobacteria that create "fungus food" (presumably some sugar) from water and CO2 (I'm sure you need to add a bit more than that, but that might be beyond the scope of a press release)
This really has nothing to do with radiation-absorbing fungi at all, except for one remark how the melanin in radiation-eating fungi could provide further shielding.
>the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid of them
Please excuse the novice question but I am confused, where does the energy come from then?
Granting the premise, the fungus gets energy (but not mass) from the natural decay of radioactive particles. It doesn't accelerate that decay, the decay happens at the same pace it would have without the fungus. Just like planting more plants doesn't make the sun burn out any faster. The fungus itself is made of carbon and all the other usual stuff life is made from.
What if the fungus accumulated radioactive particles in vesicles? Might they create chained reactions and thus deplete the radioactivity faster than spatially separated particles? Might that be plausible?
Theoretically yes, as long as the isotopes are themselves fissile and susceptible to chain reactions. E.g. U-235 is (obviously, since it's fission reactor fuel) but, say, Iodine-131 undergoes beta decay. That electron can't get into another I-131 atom and cause another decay there like neutrons do in U-325. So piling up I-131 won't get it going faster.
In principle if fungi could somehow concentrate enough fissionable material (say uranium), you could get something like the Oklo reactor going, but it would have to be a truly gigantic, probably unphysical amount of fungi to have access to that much environmental uranium in the first place and it would then have to be concentrated very strongly to get any measurable effect. You won't see anything at all if you just move a few atoms a few mm, so it would need to have very long range hyphae. You also need it to be basically one huge organism in order to collect the uranium to one place - billions of small fungi just doing a few square inches each won't work. It's unlikely the fungus could survive to become so huge on only the promise of fractionally higher future radiation, so it would need to eat something else too.
And then it would decay into daughter isotopes that don't further benefit from the concentration so it might not help a lot anyway if you're looking for cleanup. Plus you've covered your cleanup site in, presumably, millions of tonnes of fungus which might or might not be an improvement.
This gargantuan rad fungus sounds like an awesome setup for a Godzilla movie.
> Might that be plausible?
Not really. You're talking about a fungus creating essentially a nuclear reactor inside of its cells, and creating it out of fuel that's not good enough to make a nuclear reactor in the first place (it at one time was, but now it's a mess of decay products and nonsense).
Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
A chain reaction requires several kilograms, densely packed, if I'm not mistaken (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Bare_sphere). So that's already a tall order for a fungus.
But the radio-active material stays in place. These fungi absorb the radiation.
Melanin is used as a solar panel, capturing gamma rays and then passing the resulting consistent flow of excited electrons over to the Krebs cycle with the help of CO2; like in photosynthesis. Humans run on electrons resulting from Krebs cycle as well, just the input is different. By using it as shielding, you'd simply decrease the amount of ionizing radiation hitting humans inside the spaceship. In other words, it would be better than some static material as it consumes part of incoming radiation for its own existence.
I mean... you're completely right and some of the stuff is as ridiculous as you're suggesting (e.g. the furniture). However... what we're agreeing on is that the fungus is absorbing alpha/beta particles and gamma rays that are coming off the radioactive material, which in theory should mean that it would act as a radiation shield. Whether it's a more effective radiation shield than other options is the big question, and for space travel in particular the question I'd want to know is how effective is a given mass of this fungus relative to other options (e.g. water).
Id like to know about its failure modes. Does the fungus die when kept in less than ideal conditions? How quickly?
Something the fungus COULD do (in a hypothetical world) is concentrate radioisotopes along with some moderator to accelerate the fission process and harvest more energy.
Would probably require a lot more time than it would have, however, considering the relatively low amounts of radioisotopes in todays world (due to the halflife of most of them, and the age of our planet).
Several billion years ago it could have been a thing though!
Maybe in principle, but neutron radiation from fallout/etc is relatively minimal and you really just have to wait out the decay of those isotopes.
The good news is radiation detectors are insanely sensitive so you can map where the hotspots are and mitigate much of the risk using exclusion zones and / or various cleanup techniques to collect the radioactive material so it can be safety stored.
I think we’re agreeing?
Yes
But if it concentrates isotopes to accellerate fission, wouldn't that cause the material to heat up and, ultimately, kill the fungus? Depends on rate of concentration of course, if it just grabs the odd airborne isotope (if that's a thing) then maybe.
All living organisms have this problem - people who can’t sweat/are in environments with no effective evaporation die, piles of leaves with fungus can heat up so much they catch on fire and burn, etc.
Most life has evolved some sort of mechanism to control it, but sometimes it doesn’t work right.
If such a fungus existed and we had enough radioactive material lying around for it to survive, I’d expect the occasional random meltdown to occur.
Notably, this happened due to pure natural causes anyway a couple billion years ago! [https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-tw...]
I wonder if you could power something of this? If the fungus have some type of melanin that will turn ionized radiation into energy, could we then use that to power something of background radiation?
Also interesting to see how close this fungi will grow to the radiation source, or will it be able to mutate to completely envelop the radiation source.
Just dry the fungus and burn it. The process is fairly analogous to photosynthesis in plants, so we've basically already been doing this since we learned to make fire, just with a different source of radiation.
That would be fun on a space craft. Steam power spacecraft, powered by burning mushrooms.
Humans become interstellar species.
Energy source is still heated water.
And the mushrooms would be powered by cosmic radiation...
I had the same thought, I wonder if we could make better solar cells?
I don't understand why the nuclear industry wouldn't pile in to fund research into this area (as a potential way to clean up nuclear waste). Probably I don't understand how this fungus actually works and it is impossible!
As mentioned elsethread, it doesn't actually clean up anything, since it doesn't affect the waste at all, just turns some of the radiation into metabolism in the same way that plants turn solar radiation into metabolism.
Even if it did somehow accelerate the decay, it wouldn't be that useful, since (Chernobyl aside), all the waste from the typical civilian nuclear reactor can fit in a side lot on the site of the reactor complex itself (and often does!). There just isn't that much radioactive waste to clean up!
Yeah waste has been a red herring that anti nuclear people like to bring up. Yes it’s nasty stuff but there isn’t that much of it and it can be buried or reprocessed it’s not a real problem.
Low level waste is an expensive pain in the buttocks. I toured a local medical and research reactor back in highschool, and they were running out of space to store their discarded PPE and other minimally contaminated waste. You could probably empty most of the barrels on the floor and roll in the contents without any noticeable effect, and yet they still needed to be treated like real waste, just in case.
Not to disagree with you, just to say that even though it's a minor nuisance it nevertheless occupies a lot of mental space because of how annoying it is.
I don’t see a straightforward way this would actually help with the cleanup. A hypothetical microbe that “eats” oil would be useful in an oil spill as would chemically break down the oil and harvest its carbon.
A radiotropic fungus that’s in TFA can’t meaningfully affect the rate at which nuclear decay is happening. What it can do, supposedly, is to harvest the energy that the nuclear decay is releasing; normally there’s too much energy for an organism to safely handle.
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, you can’t plug your phone into high voltage transmission lines. These fungi are using melanin to moderate the extra energy, stepping it down into a range that’s useful (or at least minimally harmful).
clean it up how? by having fungus grow near it?
almost nobody cares about solving actual problems :C
for sure noone understand fully how a living organism "works" but it could be possible... at least to learn something.
I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra.
- If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture
- That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material.
- Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial ≈ 3.15 kJ 10% of that is 315 J per gram
The result is that:
The amount of radiation energy available is 4 orders of magnitude too small to power even a 10% growth boost.
Edit: updated with more accurate estimations.
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.
They don't eat the radioactive material and make it not radioactive.
[Assuming they use the radiation to get energy [1].] They just wait patiently until the radioactive atoms decay and emit radiation, like a gamma ray, and then absorb the gamma ray and use the energy. The half life of the radioactive material does not change.
[1] I still doubt this claim, but let's go along assuming the best case.
A variation on the Gray Goo scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
I'm going to do it, don't click this if you value the next 72 hours or so of your life: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
Whew thank goodness I was already exposed to that once and am, like other plagues, thus inoculated.
Same, finished it once - I'm glad it actually has an ending.
But I am going to add it to the Gray Goo wiki page under "in popular culture".
The Blob: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/?ref_=fn_t_2
This lines up with a book idea I've had for like 20 years. Crazy!
Don't wait to write sci-fi I suppose! Life may catch up, haha.
I'm trying to work out how the fungus evolves to grow its food source by causing radioactivity increase?
It can concentrate radionuclides, but the step function after inducing some criticality is likely to cause reproductive difficulty (stopping fungus evolution).
Plus: heavy metals combined with organics have a tendency towards being nasty poisonous
Idea is nothing, execution is everything.
Just write it if you want to.
I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.
I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.
But as they say, writing is hard. :)
My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.
I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.
There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.
I had a similar thought, ideas are cheap. Loads of people are like "I have this GREAT idea for an app, I just need a developer to build it!"... as if the idea on its own has value.
Unfortunately and / or fortunately thanks to AI tech, anyone with an idea can now throw it at an AI and see it materialise.
Aside from the Chernobyl part, that's basically Andromeda strain
Some similar concepts are found in The Expanse for those who have not read/seen it.
Some fungi are already the largest organisms on earth at >200 km^2
Armillaria ostoyae ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae )
Consider when organisms must pass, that these ancient fungi likely still consume the host... Thus, on a 8000 year timescale most fungi doesn't necessarily need to pursue food that naturally dies in around a century.
Yeasts are already sharing your body along with numerous other organisms that are often harmless or even beneficial. Best not think about it too much if you are uncomfortable with seeing yourself as a mini ecosystem. =3
Explainer: Armillaria ostoyae first parisitises trees and after they die (or are killed) then it shifts to a saprophytic mode to decompose the tree.
My summary after wondering why you chose the word "consume".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
Its only regret… not developing resistance to polyene antifungals.
This is basically what happened. Then they became us.
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete.
For example:
> Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial
based on what?
Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Initially i asked a AI for standard values but here is a proper source:
- Negentropy concept revisited: Standard thermodynamic properties of 16 bacteria, fungi and algae species ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00494)
> Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Yes. Clearly it grew as it grew, but the question is what drove/powered the growth.
> Initially i asked a AI for standard values
Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.
If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.
The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"
You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.
If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
I hear you.
It was really just food for thought.
> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).
> It was really just food for thought.
It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.
Um right did not think of that, if you burn a organism you get to core components but the organism was not originally made of the core components.
The core idea was not generated from a chat bot. Neither was the article i gave (that was my own googling).
The core idea (that there is a requirement and a availability of energy that may differ) was generated from my brain not that i personally think the origin of an idea matters to its value.
General rule of thumb: If you're going to ask an LLM and then make a post based on that, simply don't post it. If we wanted a randomly generated take on this, we would just ask an LLM ourselves.
There's another parameter worth considering - how efficient is it to convert sunlight vs. gamma radiation into biologically usable energy.
What if for some reason gamma radiation changes the equilibrium constants for ADP --> ATP?
Another hypothesis to test would be if the radiation is being used as a catalyst somehow.
E.g. Could be denaturing something else, unlocking a previously inaccessible energy source. Possibly some radiochemistry creating a new food source for the fungus too.
I also did some back of the envelope calculations. Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law). Now, the radiation from the elephant foot has decreased significantly. I couldn't find a recent estimate, but I would expect it to be at least 100 times lower. So at 100 meters from the elephant foot, the radiation level is a billion times lower than what you get from the sun. There's no way any organism can "feed" on that.
> Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law).
No, the elephants foot isn’t a point source at its surface.
To use an extreme example going from 1m away from the sun to 100m away from the sun doesn’t result in a 10,000x drop off in energy density. Instead the exponential drop-off occurs relative to the center of the sun because energy is coming from any point on the surface visible to that location. A similar principle applies with the elephants foot, though the geometry is more complicated.
I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.
I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concrete.
As to a point source, if you’re making an approximation use the center of the object and your 100m distance calculation would be corrected by about 25x. Though obviously the building itself provides shielding.
I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower.
In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun, and therefore fungi can't "feed" on it, because this energy is nowhere near enough to sustain life?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)#...
> Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun
Yes, the elephants foot is not the only radiation source at Chernobyl making your calculation meaningless in practice.
You’re making such a huge range of incorrect assumptions here and I was trying to correct some of them. I’m honestly done with this conversation but it’s worth remembering that order of magnitude calculates can be off by 100,000 fold when you make the wrong assumptions.
Also, Wikipedia itself says the reading was from 8 months after the accident. “At the time of its discovery, about eight months after formation, radioactivity near the Elephant's Foot was” The falloff from 8 months post accident to now isn’t actually that large because even iodine 131 had already seen 30 half lives at that point the really nasty stuff was already gone and the reasonably long lived stuff is what was left.
Finally, fungi get by on way less energy than plants do from photosynthesis it’s really not a particularly meaningful benchmark.
> That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material
Over what timeframe? If that’s 0.05 J per hour and “the researchers found that fungi that faced the galactic cosmic radiation for 26 days grew an average 1.21 times faster” 26 * 25 / 21% and the numbers don’t look that unreasonable.
I calculated over 5 days. Which was just a guess.
But i focused on the 10% mentioned.
That said time could be factored out if you did everything properly.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.
Right, it could be a lack of competition in the direction of the reactor. It's a giant petri dish for anything able to withstand radiation.
Sources dude...
>The increase in biomass and other effects could be caused either by the cells directly deriving energy from ionizing radiation, or by the radiation allowing the cells to utilize traditional nutrients either more efficiently or more rapidly
It has not actually been proven that this fungus gets energy from the radiation itself. They simply observe it growing faster in the presence of radiation which could be caused by any number of other things.
There is a pretty interesting wikipedia page dedicated to these type of fungi if someone wants a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Interesting that it uses melanin to survive, I wonder if studying it in the context of vitiligo would reveal anything given vitiligo is not well understood generally.
The article talks about fungi been attracted to ionising radiation. Per wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation
Ionizing (or ionising) radiation is particle or photon that has enough energy to detaching electron from atoms or molecules. It includes all the usual high energy radiations such as Gamma, X-rays, high energy UV, alpha, beta, neutron et al. HN high energy physicists can correct me, sounds like it is not any particular category of the harmful radiation from a nuclear disaster, it is all of them.
I was immediately reminded of Hayao Miyazaki's post-apocalyptic manga and anime film, "Nausicaa of the valley of the winds", where the fungus-and-spore-filled jungle, toxic and lethal to humans, actually serves as a sequestering and purification agent for the ecosystems affected by some apocalyptic, possibly nuclear, catastrophe.
http://www.nausicaa.net/wiki/Nausica%C3%A4_of_the_Valley_of_...
https://ghibli.fandom.com/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the...
Given we can't solve our black mold problem, might as well tell ourselves we're in symbiosis with it. It's our radiation shielding, see. That, and cactuses. Truly the science of winning.
> Zhdanova suspected that the melanin of these fungi was acting as a shield against ionising radiation.
Wouldn't that be very easy to measure? My guts tell me that using the melanin as a shield against gamma radiation has a negligible effect, if any at all.
You are assuming a molecule good at shielding against UV light is probably a poor shield against gamma rays, many orders of magnitude shorter wavelength. That sounds probable ...
But how about the theory that systems to clean up smashed up proteins from UV light is also good to clean up smashed up proteins from gamma radiation?
And one of the parts of that system, or upregulated with that system, is melanin.
That makes me wonder if Ayam Cemani chicken have better tolerance to radiation than other breeds. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayam_Cemani
How do you eat something you can’t see? It’s like eating electricity
Or sunlight.
... I mean, blind people exits. They can't see their food either, but I get where you're going: eating something with no mass.
I'm skeptical just because I know someone who has been working on the problem of radioactivity for like 30 years and they have left no stone unturned in that undertaking.
Imagine if this fungus and its radiation eating abilities was the key to interstellar travel.