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The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
71–80 of 113 posts
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#72I 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 o…
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,…
Id like to know about its failure modes. Does the fungus die when kept in less than ideal conditions? How quickly?
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#74I 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 b…
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.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#75I 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!
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
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.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#77I 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 o…
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.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#78This 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.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#80> 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