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A scientific fact/tidbit you recently learned that you thought was interesting

Darat said:
It's apparently the apparent lengths that chage.
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And also, as I said in the other thread, nothing to do with aging or apoptosis, which are when the telomeres actually lose nucleotides off the end when the cell replicates. So yes, definitely interesting, but completely irrelevant in the context in which it was brought up.
 
steenkh said:
Black mould thriving at radiation in Tchernobyl:

The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

It appears that melanin can protect organisms from radiation, and this black mould is even attracted to radiation, and is now growing inside the reactor rooms, a behaviour termed 'radiotropism'.


There is also speculation about fungi being able to gain energy from radiation:

All of this stuff is not very recent, and I apologise if it has already been brought here, but I find it interesting enough to repeat!
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Nit pick about headlines, what does that even mean to eat radiation? Don't plants all eat radiation, sort of?
 
ahhell said:
Nit pick about headlines, what does that even mean to eat radiation? Don't plants all eat radiation, sort of?
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Fungus is not a plant. It is something that lives off plants. Plants absorb radiaton of certain frequencies, but not radiation caused by the radioactive decay of elements.
 
ahhell said:
Nit pick about headlines, what does that even mean to eat radiation? Don't plants all eat radiation, sort of?
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Fungi are evolutionary much closer to animals than plants.

Plants contain the remnants of bacteria (related to blue green algae found in the sea), it is these bacterial remnants that can capture the energy from light allowing photosynthetic synthesis to occur; carbon dioxide is combined with water to make glucose and oxygen. The latter is a highly toxic gas, the build up of this gas in the atmosphere led to a terrible ecological disaster many years ago, leading to the extinction of many species.

en.wikipedia.org

Great Oxidation Event - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
rjh01 said:
Fungus is not a plant. It is something that lives off plants. Plants absorb radiaton of certain frequencies, but not radiation caused by the radioactive decay of elements.
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I think the hypothesis is that melatonin can capture the energy from radiation (the article is unclear as to the type of radiation). The fungi can use the energy for some unclear metabolic process giving them some type of evolutionary advantage. The observation seems to be that melatonin producing species are more radiation tolerant. Radiation produces toxic effects by generating reactive oxygen species (why oxygen is toxic), melatonin is an anti-oxidant so may protect against radiation toxicity, a simpler explanation.
 
Planigale said:
(the article is unclear as to the type of radiation)
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From what I've been able to find out, the contamination would mostly be beta and gamma radiation from Caesium-137 and beta radiation from Strontium-90.

The actual paper describing the fungus is of course on an Elsevier site and therefore paywalled. If anyone has access via an institution, I'd be interested in seeing it. However, the abstract that I can view for free says this (screenshot):

1764583268254.png

So - the answer to your question appears to be gamma radiation aka high-energy photons.
 
A quick search with refseek found some hits. It looks like the fungi absorb the radioactive material
On my phone and don’t have the Unpaywall plugin. I find refseek way better than google scholar nowadays

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Accumulation of radionuclides from radioactive substrata by some micromycetes - PubMed

Overgrowing (interaction) and dissolution of intact and milled hot particles by various micromycetes were studied under laboratory conditions. Hot particles used for the investigation originated from the Chernobyl accident release and atomic bomb testing sites. The micromycetes investigated were...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
I was not saying fungus are plants, I was complaining about the headline, using plants as an example of things that "eat radiation". This fungus really just seems tolerant to radiation.

Particularly the first article did nothing to substantiate the notion that the fungus was getting energy from the radiation. It could also just be that it is more tolerant than the competition so thriving due to the lack of competition. And still, what exactly does it mean to eat radiation. Like I said, is it doing something like chlorophyll in plants or something else? I think my tolerance hypothesis is more likely to be honest.
 
plenty of MAGA folk already have blue mouths from drinking hospital sanitizer fluid, they will probably pay extra for Blue Meat.
 
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