61–70 of 87 posts
Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
This reminds me of the brain maggot patient that walked in the ER. After being cleaned up, they died the next morning. Apparently the symbiosis was healthy albeit disgusting. Will be interesting if fungi end up slowing cancers and are actually fighting for the mycobiome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobiome
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminded me: > Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)
An interesting fact that I learned from the book Metazoa is that biological diversity was greater in the seas than on land, until about 130 million years ago, and then the explosion of diversity on land, at that time and still now, was because of a feedback loop that developed between plants and insects, with the insects allowing greater specialization among the plants, and the greater diversity among plants allowing…
at least until fungi figured hoe to break lingin?
Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
In a sense that’s very true. However the biggest wrinkle is that most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell. If your body is a community of microbes, it’s mostly a village of close relatives, not a symbiote like coral.
We call her LUCA, last universal common ancestor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor
AFAIK fungi are extremely hard to get rid of. This is not a great news.
0. There aren't many antimycotics.
1. The extreme measures Mount Sinai needed to clean up after C. auris. (It has a 30% mortality rate.)
One of my undergrad research projects involved growing agrobacterium [1], which is a type of bacteria that can induce a de-differentiated tumor tissue in plants. This mechanism is useful for the introduction of exogenous DNA. Tumor tissue can then be transferred to a different media to grow into a typical root system, carrying your new genes along. The bacteria essentially learned to signal to the plant which genes i…
When it's done it uses its host to go as high up the forest as possible to find a better position to release its spores more effectively.
What blew my mind was that some ant colonies have learned that the zombie fungi is susceptible to other fungi infections, which they use as kind of a defense mechanism against the zombie fungi infection. They quarantine infected zombie ants and put other fungi next to it because the zombie fungi otherwise leads to potential eradication of the colony due to it having such a huge spreading factor.
That's why a lot of observed colonies in the tropical forests seem to harvest different types of fungi (for food and defense?).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI why do you say that?
Cancer loves sugar. They generally disable the mitochondria and burn glucose in a much less efficient anaerobic process. Areas with malnutrition and lower life expectancy would not grow them very well.
Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
Beyond fascinating
Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
I recommend Stanislav Lem’s The Futurological Congress. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733473.The_Futurological... Beyond fascinating