Archive for July, 2009
According to two short news items published by Nepal News, five young people have died as result of eating poisonous mushrooms. The unfortunate deaths are related to a single incident. In both cases the youths had consumed mushrooms collected from forests near their home. Apparently all five ate from the same collection.
Attempts to get [...]
Tags: mushroom poisoning, Nepal
Did you know that Wikipedia had a fungi portal? Me neither. You can put down Wikipedia all you want to, but in my view the day will come when it is recognized as the world’s most reliable and complete encyclopedia. No sense swimming upstream against it. Rather than fight it, you ought to help make [...]
Tags: wikipedia
The July 29th Pulse of the Planet featured the cellular sound of dead yeast cells.
A transcript and audio file of the segment “Cell Sounds: Death” are available.
From the transcript:
“Jim Gimzewski recently discovered that the motion within yeast cells produces a sound you can listen to, if its highly amplified. Now, after performing various tests on [...]
“The wild mushroom season has started in Finnish forests. Chanterelles were the first to appear, and the first boletus mushrooms have also been found.” This, according to the article Mushroom Season Underway, appearing at YLE.com.
More on Finnish mushrooms:
Food from Finland: Mushrooms
Fantastic Mushroom Season
Wild Mushrooms at a Market in Finland
A Mushroom Dye workshop [...]
Tags: Finland, mushroom hunting
A tweet seems like such a small thing. After all it’s a max of 140 characters. It doesn’t take much to attract the wrong kind of attention though (fair or not).
Chicago apartment dweller Amanda Bonnen has been sued for a “false and defamatory tweet” she posted about the conditions of her living space. According to [...]
Earlier this year, Roche Applied Science sponsored a contest with a prize of 10 GB of sequence data obtained with a 454 Life Science’s Genome Sequencer FLX System. One of the winning teams plans to use the grant to perform an analysis of fungal gardens maintained by leaf cutter ants. The other [...]
Tags: genomics
With the release of Amazon.com’s new wider-format Kindle reader, I though it might be a good idea to provide a list of mycology books available for the increasingly popular e-reader.
A new page at MycoRant called “Mycology Books for Kindle” can be found in the Pages section on the right side bar. Sales referrals help to [...]
Both Science and Biotechniques recently published lists of books recommended for summer reading. No sense me listing them again, but if you are interested, check them out:
Biotechniques Top 10 Science Books for Summer
Pages to Turn on a Lazy Day (pay per view), Science 5 June 2009: Vol. 324. no. 5932, pp. 1267 – 1269
Tags: books
Remember the badger, mushroom, snake video? No? Hmnn. Some middle school kids I was teaching introduced it to me several years ago. I had to admit it was fairly entertaining. Might even be worth another viewing (every few years).
According to a comment at YouTube “The actual lyrics are ‘magic magic magic mushroom’. Someone just got [...]
Tamoxifen is a drug used to both treat and prevent recurrence of breast cancer. It works by disrupting estrogen, which is known to promote the growth and spread of some forms of breast cancer. New research from the University of Rochester Medical Center suggests that tamoxifen shows promise as an antifungal agent as well. It [...]
Tags: antifungal, cancer, tamoxifen
There is this band from Texas, see. They are Fungi Girls (no girls included). They do like mushrooms though. Bassist Skyler Salinas recently took a moment to answer a few questions about the band.
MycoRant: Tell us a bit about the band.
Skyler: We’re a band of kids from suburban and rural Texas that make music. Jacob [...]
Tags: Fungi Girls, music
A tweet sent by fungalgenomes makes the point that Phytopthora infestans, causative of agent of late blight, is not a fungus. Okay I agree. It’s a fungal protist, an Oomycete (commonly known as a water mold) occupying a place that is not exactly fungal, not exactly animal, not completely a typical protist. Oomyctes were formerly [...]
Tags: Oomyctes, phytopathology, Phytophthora
The following thread (names have been removed) has recently appeared on the Google group for DIY Bio (that’s do it yourself biology). Feel free to mosey on over and sign up to chime in, or to get involved with many of the other projects/discussions going on over there.
===================
TOPIC: Mushroom test kits
===================
Has anyone ever heard of [...]
Tags: identification, mushroom poisoning
One website that is well worth checking periodically is ScienceDaily.com. That’s where I found this fresh article, Controlling Kudzu with Naturally Occurring Fungus, on efforts at biocontrol of the invasive plant kudzu. Kudzu has been spreading throughout the Southestern U.S. since its introduction during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.
Since 1998, Doug Boyette (ARS Southern [...]
Tags: biocontrol, kudzu
Well, maybe not, but that is an attention-getting headline eh?
But seriously, in the article Bag tax onerous, maybe unhealthy, a claim is made that two independent studies have concluded that “64 percent of the reusable bags in the study were contaminated with bacteria; nearly 30 percent showed bacterial counts higher than what is considered safe. [...]
Tags: food, Mycologists
An article appeared earlier this month at the website of The Missourian, highlighting the efforts of local mushroom growers to make a dent in the market and their bank accounts. Mushroom Farmers Work to Expand in Missouri, by Lisa Appleton, appeared on July 12, 2009.
Mostly, it’s about the efforts of some small time growers, and [...]
Tags: mushroom growing
As part of a performance art installation, Martha Crockatt, a scientist at Cardiff University, took a turn from 3-4am (July 15th?), on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. She was dressed sort of like a mushroom. An Amanita muscaria by the looks of it.
According to Martha, “My time on the plinth was a celebration of an [...]
Tags: weird science
