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Bet you can’t make this out of mushrooms. Tate Modern, London. Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash
I just want to live in a mushroom house. Is that too much to ask? Science says no! We can totally do that.
Could cities soon be made of mushrooms?
Ah, mushrooms. Some are tasty, some are deadly and some will make you lick your hand and talk to the floor. But did you know that they could solve a ton of problems in the world’s cities? Some scientists believe that fungi could be used to clean rivers, as fuel in vehicles, and even to build homes.
As far-fetched as it sounds, the idea of building stuff out of mushrooms is pretty well established.
If you’re a Smurf, I guess. But go on…
The technology already exists and there’s an entire professional field – ‘myco-architecture’ – dedicated to it. In 2014, New York’s Museum of Modern Art commissioned a circular tower made of 10,000 bricks containing a mix of living mushrooms and corn stalk waste. Sure, the structure – named Hy-Fi – wasn’t habitable or particularly resilient (it’s since been taken down and composted), but it did show the potential of using fungi to build stuff.
Ok, but what if I don’t want to live inside the Museum of Modern Art?
Scientists working with this technology technically don’t use mushrooms exactly but things called mycelia, the root-like parts of a fungus. These can be grown into very complex, precise and strong structures, making it a really useful and adaptable building material.
That sounds a little more practical.
Stuff made out of mycelia is also lightweight, fire-resistant and really easy to produce. ‘I’d like to envision a future where everything we need for a building project is made by fungi,’ says Maurizio Montalti, co-founder of Italian mycelia production firm Mogu. ‘Fungi have the potential to replace materials like plastic, stones and so on.’ From flooring and acoustic panels to bricks and art pieces, Mogu is already trying to propel myco-architecture into the mainstream.
And that sounds like you’ve been getting high on your own mushroom bricks. But Mogu is already trying to propel myco-architecture into the mainstream is a sentence I never thought I’d read. So thanks for that.
Most parents probably didn’t need science to know this. But it explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Brains shift in adolescence to tune out parents' voices
So, if it seems like your teenager is tuning you out, that may well be the case. But, Abrams said, "it's not personal. This is a natural part of development."
The findings build on a 2016 study by the Stanford team showing that unlike strangers' voices, the sound of mom's voice "lights up" reward centers in a younger child's brain. That makes sense, Abrams said, as parents are the center of a child's world -- their primary source of learning, which includes social and emotional development.
Enter the new study, which included 46 kids, aged 7 to 16, who underwent functional MRI scans. It allowed the researchers to view their brain activity while they listened to recordings of either their own mother's voice or unfamiliar female voices.
It turned out that teenagers were clearly distinct from younger kids. Their brain reward centers lit up more in response to the unknown voices versus mom's -- as did a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which places value on social information.
The full study is here in the Journal of Neuroscience: A neurodevelopmental shift in reward circuitry from mother’s to nonfamilial voices in adolescence
Eat more mammoth! What did cavemen eat? Anything they could kill, apparently.
Humans Were Actually Apex Predators For 2 Million Years, Evidence Shows
It's not quite the balanced diet of berries, grains, and steak we might picture when we think of 'paleo' food. But according to anthropologists from Israel's Tel Aviv University and the University of Minho in Portugal, modern hunter-gatherers have given us the wrong impression of what we once ate.
"This comparison is futile, however, because 2 million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals – while today's hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty," said Miki Ben‐Dor from Israel's Tel Aviv University in April last year.
A look through hundreds of previous studies on everything from modern human anatomy and physiology to measures of the isotopes inside ancient human bones and teeth suggests we were primarily apex predators until roughly 12,000 years ago.
Oh, we still are. We still are. Just ask any mammoth. If you can find one.
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