Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Climate Change and Environmental Issues A Fungus Amungus

I have some umami powder that is made from shiitake mushrooms. It makes a great addition to anything you want to add some more savory taste. Just used some tonight to jazz up some rather bland homemade cashew chicken.

I use a pound of mushrooms a week for the umami boost and the nutrients. Mushrooms are a superfood. I'd like to use fancier mushrooms but they don't grow here and as Ken said they can be pretty pricey. Creminis do everything a mushroom needs to do for me.

I know this is off-topic but I just discovered that the long time puzzle of deciphering how a protein folds has allegedly been solved. Or at least has been claimed to have been solved. Although it is still awaiting peer review.

What do you make of this PIA?

Link

No, Not really solved by AI

This is real progress, but also quite a bit of hype and exaggeration!
TAT

No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding
Posted on December 2, 2020 by Stephen

This week DeepMind has announced that, using artificial intelligence (AI), it has solved the 50-year old problem of ‘protein folding’. The announcement was made as the results were released from the 14th and latest competition on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). The competition pits teams of computational scientists against one another to see whose method is the best at predicting the structures of protein molecules – and DeepMind’s solution, ‘AlphaFold 2’, emerged as the clear winner.
201202-DeepMind-blog

I agree: Supercomputers can only suggest possible solutions to such problems. They have to be verified with real wet-lab experiments. But just having some of those likely solutions is far better than assembling a stick & ball model of a protein and fiddling around with different folds!

Remember that different folds actually occur in vivo, and we call the really bad ones "prions".

AI can be very good at certain tasks, but it's current capabilities are way, way less sophisticated than most people imagine. For one thing, an AI can only learn about things it has "seen". That's why Tesla's autopilot drove right into a truck parked across the interstate. Even Deep Mind is just a very fast idiot. Not even as smart as a mouse.

Whoa, dude… I wouldn’t say that too loud. Deep Mind might want some retribution!

Are fungal mycelia actually the neural network of the soil?

Let's begin with a couple of riddles.

What's bigger than a whale, yet hides out of sight? What could fill 250 semitrucks, yet spreads itself thin?

The answer lies in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon and it tries to kill whatever it touches.

But to see it, you have to know what to look for.

It's a fungus.

Oregons humongous fungus Giant myceliar network

Yes indeed most of the fungal world is invisable to us unless we look underground. I found a 8 ft mulch pile covered by oyster mushrooms last year. I attempted to transplant is to my yard, and while digging chunks of the colony out is was very clear that the entire pile was a dense mass of white mycelium holding the whole thing together. Obviously it had consumed whatever it was eating in the pile and was looking for a new food source by promiscuously sporulating.
Fungi come in all sorts of temperaments, some grow on dead material, like the oysters, some reach out and actually help the trees utilize nutrients that the tree cant mobilize and reward us with truffles and Porcini schroom, and some of the network communicate and deliver death threats as parasites to healthy trees, like the largest living organism in Oregon. This organism was developed by DARPA under the direction of James Watt and planted in strategic locations thousands of years ago by using the time machine also from DARPA.

Frankly I'm very surprised that those plant pathologists trying all those abatement tactics and stratergeries never mentioned testing sample of the fungus in the lab with fungicides. They may be afraid of generating a multidrug resistant fungus that gets pissed off and starts to spread much faster in its goal of world deforestation.

Maybe they are edible, they didnt mention if they tried eating them. Perhaps they taste like turpentine!
TAT

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the fruiting body (a mushroom) is most of the organism. It's really all about the mycelium. Mushrooms are just reproductive organs the mycelium sticks out there when conditions are right. It's pretty funny that many of them look like penises, but that's what they are!

I dont believe you! I'm going to look it up on the google machine and prove you wrong! With tens of thousands of genders why would they chose that? Oh yeah, That!