Archive for the ‘Info’ Category
I think it was on a cooking show on the radio the other day (or maybe just a news report) that I heard that a fungal disease was playing havoc with basil plants in some parts of the U.S. I figured it might be worth looking into. Sure enough, a Google news search for “basil” [...]
Tags: basil, downy mildew, Margaret McGrath, Peronospora
The Telluride Mushroom Festival in Telluride, Colorado (where else?) will be held from August 26-29, 2010. This, dubbed the 30th Annual Celebration of All Things Fungal & Entheogenic, features guest speakers Paul Stamets, Gary Lincoff and Daniel Winkler, among others.
From the Festival website:
A four-day intensive with workshops, slide-shows, films and lectures in [...]
Tags: Colorado, Daniel Winkler, Gary Lincoff, Paul Stamets, Telluride Mushroom Festival
Mushroom photographer Taylor Lockwood has returned from his expedition to Brazil and the Amazon River region. While there he was able to get some great new photographs of interesting mushrooms, including the recently discovered bioluminescent species. He reports that there was quite a bit of of local traffic in the area where these mushrooms are [...]
Tags: Amazon, bioluminescence, Brazil, Mycena, mycoremediation, Pleurotus, Taylor Lockwood
You know it is a good day at the library when you walk by the magazine rack and see a false-color electron micrograph image of a conidiophore on a cover. It was the cover of the May 22, edition of ScienceNews, which happened to contain a feature article entitled I, Mold by Laura Bell. It [...]
Tags: Aspergillus, Candida, Cryptococcus, fungal disease, medical mycology, mold, ScienceNews
More museums ought to do stuff like this. The National Museum of Natural History in Sofia, Bulgaria recently put together a display, The mushrooms – familiar or dangerous:
Briefly presented is kingdom Fungi – characteristics, distribution, and systematics. Photos and replicas show the most popular edible mushrooms and their poisonous counterparts, and how to [...]
Tags: Bulgaria, mushrooms, Science Centric
If you plan on collecting more than “a gallon” of mushrooms in the State of Washington, you better get your permit. Details in Commercial mushroom permits available published by the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin:
Permits for commercial mushroom gathering in the three Blue Mountain forests are now available. The permits are required for anyone intending [...]
Tags: commercial collecting, mushroom collecting, permits, Washington state, wild mushrooms
The Yeast Resource Center Public Image Repository (YRC PIR) is a large database of fluorescence microscopy images of yeast, with a focus on the important model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae with some attention given to S. pombe.
84,270 Experiments
530,982 images
~450 gigabytes of data
Not bad.
A press release posted at 7th Space offers a short introduction:
There is increasing [...]
Tags: fluorescence microscopy, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast, Yeast Resource Center Public Image Repository, YRC PIR
Afghan poppy farmers, who grow a big chunk of the poppies used to supply the world with opium, are accusing NATO of infecting their fields with a poppy-killing fungus. They just might be right.
According to Fungus hits Afghan opium poppies:
A serious disease is affecting opium poppies in Afghanistan, Antonio Maria Costa, the head [...]
Tags: biocontrol, mycoherbacide, opium, Papaver somniferum, Pleospora papaveracea, poppies
Valley Fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis, is an infection caused by a fungus endemic to the dry Southwest region of the United Stated. Although the causative agent, Coccidioides immitis, it is known to exist in the Chihuahua Desert region there is a large discrepancy between the number of cases reported in Arizona and neighboring New [...]
Tags: Coccidioides immitis, coccidioidomycosis, New Mexico, nikkomycin Z, valley fever
I do not know how Kevin Lewis of Boston.com found out about a forthcoming Evolution and Human Behavior paper by Pacheco-Cobos, L. et al., “Sex Differences in Mushroom Gathering: Men Expend More Energy to Obtain Equivalent Benefits” but you gotta’ respect him for it. In his column, Uncommon Knowledge, Lewis briefly describes the [...]
Tags: gathering mushrooms, human behavior, mushroom gathering, mushroom hunting
It’s not every day you get clued in on a story of possible mycological interest by visiting the Drudge Report (FYI, to balance things out, I also check The Huffington Post). But, there it was–Potentially deadly fungus spreading in US, Canada.
A potentially deadly strain of fungus is spreading among animals and people in the [...]
Tags: cryptococcosis, Cryptococcus gattii, fungal disease, medical mycology
It looks like things are going to get worse before they get better when it comes to bats and the fungal scourge of white nose syndrome (WNS). Over the past month there has been steady production of web updates on the spread of the disease and recently there has been an uptick.
What Can Be Done [...]
Tags: bats, white nose syndrome, WNS
Thanks to a tip from @mushrooming, we learn of some recent research out of Japan that could lead to greater yields of mushrooms. It sounds like something Nicola Tesla would have tried (who knows, maybe he even did) but according to Lightning-powered mushrooms could boost food yields:
Japanese farming lore has long observed that plentiful mushroom [...]
Tags: electricity, mushroom growing, nameko, shiitake
Strobel’s mycodiesel project maybe getting some competition from researchers in Spain according to Direct Production of Biodiesel from the Fungus M. circinelloides; Opportunity to Enhance Yield with Genetic Engineering:
Researchers in Spain have demonstrated the direct transformation of biomass consisting of the fungus M. circinelloides into biodiesel compliant with ASTM D6751 and [...]
Tags: biodiesel, biofuel, Mucor, mycodiesel
What information about those delicate fungal flavors and aromas will now yield itself to the prying machines of molecular biologists? French and Italian researchers announced in the journal Nature, that the genome of the Perigord black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) has been sequenced. Of course if you followed fungal news on twitter, you’d already know this, [...]
Tags: genome sequencing, genomics, perigord black truffle, symbiosis genes, truffle genome sequenced, Tuber mating types, Tuber melanosporum
While perusing some of the content at Scientific American this morning, I saw an advertisement that enticed my mouse to click it. It was for Scitable by natureEducation. Scitable has the tagline “A Collaborative Learning Space for Science.”
Scitable, the Online Science Library and Personal Learning Tool
According the the site homepage, Scitable is:
A free science library [...]
Tags: education, genetics, learning network, molecular biology, Nature Publishing, on-line resource, Scitable
In an unusual case of mycosis, a monkey at the Chattanooga Zoo in Tennessee has died after contracting an infection with the pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans. The case is all the more sad since the animal was a rare cottontop tamarin (Saguinus oedipus) born in captivity, only just last May. According to Endangered monkey dies [...]
Tags: animal mycoses, cottontop tamarin, cryptococcosis, Cryptococcus neoformans
Polyurethane is used in a wide variety of products ranging from insulation, auto parts, plastic ware, packaging, adhesives and sealants, and many others. As a result, a large quantity of this useful and important plastic finds its way into waste streams every year.
The problem is, polyurethane is resistant to degradation and has a reputation as [...]
Tags: bioremediation, degradation of plastics, fungal composting, polurethane
News reports out of Zimbabwe state that six people have recently died there from eating poisonous wild mushrooms. The article Toxic Mushrooms Kill Six shows a picture of Galerina autumnalis, but the article does not state which mushrooms are responsible for the tragic fatalities, which included a three year-old girl.
Six people have died in the [...]
Tags: Africa, mushroom poisoning, Zimbabwe
A fungus has been deemed interesting and scary enough to grace the pages of Wired magazine along side Google’s search algorithm, the future of money, and a retrospective of the dotcom boom and bust. Way to go stem rust Ug99! Er…, make that “Oh drat. Starvation. That’s bad.”
Wheat Stem Rust on the Rampage
Thanks to a [...]
Tags: phytopathology, Puccinia gramminis, stem rust, Ug99, wheat rust, Wired
Nail fungus (onychomycosis) affects more than 10 percent of the population in the U.S. Although a variety of treatments exist, including home remedies (which seldom work), topical and oral pharmaceuticals, and even lasers, the ultimate cure has yet to be found.
That Darned Nail Fungus
People don’t like having nail fungus. Although most insurance plans do not [...]
Tags: AN2690, Anacor, antifungal, Merck, nail fungus, onchyomycosis
