class is out!

welcome back everybody, it's been a while, but it sure is good to see all your friendly faces smiling around our little campfire. ah. smell that sagebrush? hear that coyote? what a world friends! what a world!
a few updates:

they got the raccoon!

"RE: Dead Raccoon
Thanks, we'll get it. "

jacob perkins & the nobody are on tour
i'd recommend the takilma show if you can make it

i rode through the posey tube today. (following excerpt from a gchat conversation)

"the bike path was exactly as wide as one bicycle. on the left was a rusty handrail, then a 6ft drop to the crowded busy freeway. on the right was a dirty white tile wall that curved up over me to form the top of the tube. if i deviated just the slightest fraction i would hit either the wall or the handrail. the tube is 3545ft long. dark & dirty. the fumes were so thick and acrid that my eyes were burning the whole way and i choked as i pedaled up the slight slope. the sound in the tunnel was a huge roar with intermittent honks. big trucks passed just feet from me, but i was oddly above the cars, looking down on them. there was a pedestrian walking in the opposite direction and he literally had to climb up on the handrail and i had to brush against the white tile to make it past each other. i almost had a panic attack."

they also found out that 1km below the ocean floor there are organisms that may be 111million years old. and that 85% of snowflakes form around bacteria.

here's an idea...
some bracket fungus species exhibit nondeterministic growth, i.e. they're able to alter their growth habits, size, and form in response to environmental variables. these conk fungi have hard, wood-like fruiting bodies that are tough and durable. i suggest that bio-engineered fungus of this type may be able to provide shelter, furniture, and entire houses. a hybridized, gen-mod spore could be cultured on any bio-waste stream and assume the programmed form. grow a wall, a roof, a chair, a table. when the useful lifespan of that object had come to and end, the mushroom would produce spores, which could be harvested and taken to the next domicile or homesite, where the process could begin again. the old conk would simple decompose.

Fungus... making uranium safe again and eating radiation

I know this is sort of getting ridiculous but here's yet ANOTHER story about the amazing abilities of fungi to bioremediate. This time it's depleted uranium. A product of the military-industrial complex and its unending wars this heavy metal is found in the soil of a battlefield where armor piercing bullets were fired. But long after the killing has stopped, this heavy metal remains, leaching into groundwater, getting taken up into plants and animals, and making its way into people where it poses a serious threat of toxicity.

Along come mushrooms whose filamentous network of mycelium can colonize the uranium and via oxidation convert it into a stable mineral form, uranyl phosphate. While still hazardous (just as uranium ore is hazardous) this new chemical configuration is not bio-active, making it much more difficult for the uranium to get into humans or the groundwater.

This is great news and really underscores just how important microorganisms are in effecting soil composition and ecosystem health.

This story has some pretty interesting overlap with a report published last year that found fungus can actually convert radiation energy into biomass. It does this through the chemical melanin (found in your skin) that can capture ionizing radiation into chemical energy, much as a green plant uses chlorophyll to accomplish the same thing but with a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So maybe the fungus that can take uranium out of the bio-cycle are actually using the metal as an energy source, a sort of mini nuclear reactor that it can tap into and at the same time process the waste. Genius!




http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210932.htm


http://www.physorg.com/news129181478.html

Dead Raccoon

I found a dead raccoon lying face down in Strawberry Creek (the one that flows through the middle of the UC campus) I fished it out and decided I'd alert the authorities. But how to tell them where the raccoon was? No address or street name could help me. The answer? a little GIS to the rescue!