"ExoticRainforest"
Sent by: aroid-l-bounces@gizmoworks.com
05/24/2007 03:06 PM
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Re: [Aroid-l] OT: Fungi that eat ionizing
radiation?
Ted,
Far be it for me to discredit or vouch for any of this!
But I did find it interesting due to another interest dear to my
heart. I'm one of less than a thousand people in the world who can
document having logged over 5000 scuba dives. My time in the water
as a professional underwater photographer included time in a deep submersible.
Never got to go down to the deep water in the mid-Atlantic rift or
the really deep water off Galapagos but I recently saw a National Geographic
special which featured deep ocean dives to both areas of the ocean where
live volcanoes are constantly spewing on the ocean floor. The National
Geographic team found large incredible marine life actually using the noxious
gasses produced by these volcanoes as a food source. And to top that,
many were living in water with a temp approaching 800 degrees! Some
were photographed crawling into vents so hot it was actually burning them
alive and they were happily gathering and eating the stuff!
Nothing ought to be able to live in complete darkness,
with extremely high temperatures while using "poisons" as food,
but they do! So I don't have any idea if anything in this article
is factual, but apparently life can and does exist in places we would not
have previously expected it to survive. Perhaps the "Blob"
exists as well!
Steve Lucas
www.ExoticRainforest.com
----- Original Message -----
To: Discussion
of aroids
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 9:37 AM
Subject: Re: [Aroid-l] OT: Fungi that eat ionizing
radiation?
I looked a little at this reference and I am putting myself down as a skeptic.
This paper looks to have been published without peer review through funding
from George Soros. Neither of those is proof by itself, of course, but
it makes the scientifically minded put on the brakes a little bit. I was
interested in the claim that living fungi were found growing inside Chernobyl
and I clicked on the reference indicated in the paper, at the NIH, and
no article was listed there. The site was, in fact, the NIH site, but there
was no article. This blunder would never happen in a peer-reviewed paper.
Then there's the whole idea that some living thing (defined according to
how that is understood by those of us who live on Earth) can not only survive
ionizing radiation but utilize it to perform life functions. I have watched
certain effects of ionizing radiation (x-rays) on formerly living materials
and would be surprised if melanin could even withstand ionizing radiation
without charring all the way to carbon, much less "eat" it. Then,
of course, the life form would have to have some cell structure to support
the melanin and make use of the energy products therefrom. Big doubts.
Ionizing radiation is severe stuff. And my understanding of the Chernobyl
reactor is that it is now encased in concrete and nobody with any sense
goes anywhere near it. But they have robots in there that are able to retrieve
samples? And some researchers at Albert Einstein have these samples and
are conducting research, also using ionizing radiation? And word of such
a discovery did not make it onto the evening news?
I don't have time to pursue this further, but it smells like "fringe"
science. That is to say, a hoax. There is a lot of this kind of stuff on
the internet. You have to be careful.
Ted.
Steve Marak
Sent by: aroid-l-bounces@gizmoworks.com
05/24/2007 12:03 AM
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[Aroid-l] OT: Fungi that eat ionizing
radiation?
A bit off topic, but I know others on the list like these things too ...
A post today on one of the bulb lists I follow gave a link to a
"fascinating-if-true" paper on the possibility that some fungi
can use ionizing
radiation as a direct energy source in a way similar to plant's use of
visible
light.
An abstract is at:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/aeco-erd051607.php
and the full paper seems to be available online at PLoS ONE at:
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000457
Ok, it's not exactly "The Blob", but the part about melanized
fungi colonizing
the walls of the damaged Chernobyl reactor has at least a bit of those
old
1960's science fiction "B" movies about it. If it were April
1, I'd assume it
was a joke ... but I admit I hope it's true.
Steve
-- Steve Marak
-- samarak@gizmoworks.com
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