Live data from Hacker News

Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

technologynetworks.com

21–30 of 112 posts

Re: Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

#22
post #12

Why are so many videos using computer generated voice overs? I find find it a real turn off.

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 go…

>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.

Re: Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

#24

Why are so many videos using computer generated voice overs? I find find it a real turn off.

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.

Re: Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

#25

For a nonvideo source of info on this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534v1

>> 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?

Re: Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

#26
post #11

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.

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

Re: Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis

#29
post #11

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.

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 i…

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