{"id":101182,"date":"2020-01-21T19:07:20","date_gmt":"2020-01-22T03:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/radiation-eating-fungi-finding-could-trigger-recalculation-of-earths-energy-balance-and-help-feed-astronauts"},"modified":"2020-01-21T19:07:20","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T03:07:20","slug":"radiation-eating-fungi-finding-could-trigger-recalculation-of-earths-energy-balance-and-help-feed-astronauts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/radiation-eating-fungi-finding-could-trigger-recalculation-of-earths-energy-balance-and-help-feed-astronauts","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Radiation-eating\u2019 Fungi Finding Could Trigger Recalculation Of Earth\u2019s Energy Balance And Help Feed Astronauts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they\u2019re making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth\u2019s energetics\u2014in particular, the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy\u2014may need to be recalculated,\u201d says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology &amp; immunology at Einstein and senior author of the study, published May 23 in PLoS ONE.<\/p>\n<p>The ability of fungi to live off radiation could also prove useful to people: \u201cSince ionizing radiation is prevalent in outer space, astronauts might be able to rely on fungi as an inexhaustible food source on long missions or for colonizing other planets,\u201d says Dr. Ekaterina Dadachova, associate professor of nuclear medicine and microbiology &amp; immunology at Einstein and lead author of the study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506,873,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food","category-nuclear-energy","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}