DailyDirt: The Fungus Among Us

Miscellaneous

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Sep 14th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Fungi are fascinating organisms. They can grow on almost anything and decompose all kinds of materials into soil and other useful stuff. Folks are finding more and more uses for these sometimes-tasty-or-sometimes-poisonous little suckers. So here are a just few fun links on fungi.

A mystery fungus that covered an entire town turned out to really like the vaporized ethanol produced by the local whiskey distilleries. So now the joke about a mushroom walking into a bar actually has a bit more to it. [url]
If you want to learn how to grow your own fungus, there are a bunch of seminars waiting for you. You'll have to wait until 2012 for an opening, though. [url]
Growing gourmet mushrooms can actually be a nice little business. Especially if you can grow your shrooms on waste materials like coffee grounds and sell the mushroom soil. [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: food, fungus

6 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 14 Sep 2011 @ 5:24pm

"They tried to do what any college kids would try to do -- sell it on Craigslist. As it turns out there's actually a huge market out there for mushroom soil. Now they sell that too."

Somehow that made my day already, you get a problem and do the stupid thing first and it works LoL
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Sep 2011 @ 5:38pm

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_angelsshare/

It is weird that I got entranced by the mystery fungus story like if I was reading a mystery novel or something?
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Michael Ho (profile), 14 Sep 2011 @ 6:46pm

Re:
heh.. given how many versions of "CSI" TV shows there are, I think there must be some kind of hard-wired part of human brains that is programmed to enjoy following weird mysteries.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 14 Sep 2011 @ 11:52pm

A Note To Vegetarians ...
... fungi are genetically closer to animals than to plants.
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Michael Ho (profile), 15 Sep 2011 @ 12:12am

Re: A Note To Vegetarians ...
heh. Good point, Lawrence D'Oliveiro... The "Animal vs Plant" kingdom system is really messy now that biologists are constantly finding extremophiles that blur the lines between how food is consumed in organisms.
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Jimr (profile), 15 Sep 2011 @ 6:46am

mmmmmmm.... tasty poisonous fungus
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