Phil Ross may have discovered the building material of the future. It's sturdy, resilient, and environmentally sustainable—practically inexhaustible, in fact. It can withstand everything from extreme temperature to a hail of bullets, and once its no longer useful, it can be easily composted.
There's only one problem: Some people might not be ready to live in houses built from fungus.
Ross has been experimenting with fungi in his art practice for almost two decades. By introducing mushroom tissue into molds filled with pasteurized sawdust and allowing the fungus to digest the material, hes built fungal sculptures that have been exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world. He's grown mushroom side-tables and lounge chairs. But it wasn't until he built a small teahouse from Reishi mushroom bricks at the Kunsthalle Dsseldorf—and then boiled the bricks themselves into tea for gallery visitors to drink—that he realized this material might have life beyond the museum walls.
The teahouse, Mycotectural Alpha, was Ross' first proper piece of "mycotecture." A blobby brown building not much taller than a person, it looked more Cronenberg than Le Corbusier. But the fungal bricks used to build it were so strong they broke nearly all of Ross woodworking tools. In subsequent art shows, lectures, and projects, he refined his process, and it wasn't long before companies began to approach him to help develop fungal materials for industrial uses.
Ross, who teaches art at the University of San Francisco and calls himself a "bad capitalist," saw the potential of his very specific skill set. He decided to double down. He filed for patent and launched a startup of his own called MycoWorks.
He almost exclusively refers to his mycelial bricks and components as "the material," which lends an eerily science-fictional tone to his enterprise. "The cultural acceptance of the material is very critical," he explains. "Fungus poses a lot of specific challenges in the West, because we associate fungus with houses that get mold, or shoe fungus—these are primary ideas of fungi."
Indeed, it may seem a little batty, even repulsive, to build with fungus. But, as is often the case with new technologies, it just requires a cultural paradigm shift before it begins to look completely reasonable. Fungal mycelium—the vegetative part of a fungus, a mass of branching, thread-like filaments—is a biological powerhouse. It can net, spread, propagate, and convey nutrients over great distances, in biological networks that mycologist Paul Stamets has compared to the human Internet and the physical structure of the Universe itself.
We're closer to fungus than we think
We're closer to fungus than we think. The topsoil of our planet is practically held together by a global network of fungal mycelium, and even though the animal kingdom branched off from its fungal counterpart some 600 million years ago, we still share over half our DNA with fungi. Historically, culturally, and biologically, we are incredibly close to mushrooms.
That closeness can be exploited to our benefit: many powerful antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, while anti-fungal antibiotics tend to harm us, precisely because of our interlinked relationship with mushrooms.
All it takes to build one of Phil Ross' fungal bricks is some organic matter, like agricultural waste or sawdust, and a tiny piece of mushroom. As the fungus consumes the nutrients in the sawdust, the fine threads of its mycelium wind into a solid block of cells, which can be formed into any shape so long as they remain alive. Put two living fungal bricks next to each other, and they will fuse together in an unbreakable bond within a matter of hours. Cure the material to stop the fungus' growth, et voil: bulletproof mushroom slab.
Although Ross has never seen the show, he's told his MycoWorks lab is more than a little evocative of Breaking Bad. "In some ways," he says, "it's sophisticated, and there's very advanced machinery, but it's held together with duct tape and plastic sheeting."
That being said, MycoWorks is on the forefront of what's poised to be a huge industry, transforming agricultural waste, with a little fungal assistance, into robust biomaterials capable of meeting the sustainability challenges of our insane century.
MycoWorks is a young company. It already has some competition from Ecovative Design, based in New York, who produce biodegradable mycelium-based packing materials for shipping, among other shroomy stuff. This year, Evocative partnered with architect David Benjamin to build Hy-Fi, a fungal tower in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 in New York. Built from 10,000 mycelial bricks coated in a reflective film, the glistening white structure—which looks patently inorganic, but is entirely compostable—has done a great deal to educate, and inspire the public to the possibilities of building with mushrooms.
We can build a house right now
Ross is more artist than businessman, and is mostly jazzed on the increased visibility. "We're about to see a proliferation of even more fantastic objects into the world that are made out of this stuff," he tells me.
Speaking to Phil Ross, I found myself completely seduced by the idea of living surrounded by this formidable fungal material. How marvelous to build in collaboration with nature—to allow the strength of a living thing to forge the walls and floors of a place meant for living. When might I be able to grow my own home? I posed the question to Ross. Surprisingly, the answer is: soon.
"We can build a house right now" says Ross. "We know how to build the structures and forms to do it. We can plan, from what we know about the material, and make engineering drawings based on its physical qualities."
The real stumbling blocks aren't technological as much as logistical—in order to receive recognition from the building industry, the material needs to be comprehensively tested, and the effects of weather need to be better understood. MycoWorks and its competitors will have to publish extensively and forge partnerships with educational institutions and perhaps, as in the case of the Hy-Fi tower at MoMA PS1, art museums, to demonstrate their viability to the public. Resistance to the material must give to acceptance, and then enthusiastic support.
It's not unreasonable. These days, when Ross and the MycoWorks team show prototypes of their material to the public, he senses a greater acceptance from people, a greater willingness to engage with ideas of nature, than he has in the past. People are "feeling the armageddon at the door," Ross suggests. "I dont know if it's a change, or this is a mutation, but the zeitgeist of nature is happening."
It's not just the NSA: A Federal Appeals Court has just noted a disturbing and "extraordinary" trend of the Navy conducting mass surveillance on American civilians, and then using what they find to help local law enforcement prosecute criminals.
In this specific case, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service agent in George scanned the computers of every civilian in Washington state who happened to be using the decentralized Gnutella peer-to-peer network, looking for child pornography. The agent, Steve Logan, found child porn on a computer owned by a man named Michael Dreyer.
Logan then passed his evidence on to local law enforcement, who arrested and eventually convicted Dreyer, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled that this was a massive overstep of military authority, a disturbing trend, and a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that prohibits the military from conducting investigations on civilians.
The government argued that it conducted the surveillance on the off chance that it caught a military member violating the law and suggested that it has this authority in any state with a military base.
the Navy routinely carries out broad surveillance activities that violate the restrictions on military enforcement of civilian law.
This case, Judge Marsha Berzon argued, demonstrates that that's clearly not the case.
"The government's position that the military may monitor and search all computers in a state even though it has no reason to believe that the computer's owner has a military affiliation would render the PCA's restrictions entirely meaningless," she wrote. "The record here demonstrates that Agent Logan and other NCIS agents routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate the restrictions on military enforcement of civilian law."
The violation was so egregious that Berzon and her fellow judges argued that "the extraordinary nature of the surveillance demonstrates a need to deter future violations."
"It has become routine practice for the Navy to conduct surveillance of all the civilian computers in an entire state to see whether any child pornography can be found on them, and then to turn over the information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists," she added.
We can talk about NSA reform all we want, but the fact remains that it's not just the NSA that can and does conduct mass surveillance, whether it's legal to do so or not.
“Another time, Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America’. To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived.”
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Mark Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics (via nerdhapley)
It’s Jack Kirby’s birthday, so here’s that story of him being bad ass all of the time.
True fact: during WWII Kirby was assigned as a scout due to his art skills, meaning that he went in alone and unarmed, ahead of Allied attacks so that he could draw enemy fortifications.
Once he was ambushed by three Nazi soldiers, all of them with guns. He killed all three with a knife he stole from one of them.
"Spanking is a sex act. It has been for a very long time—probably even longer than it’s been a parenting choice. A fresco at the Etruscan Tomb of the Whipping, which dates back to approximately 490 B.C., depicts an erotic spanking."
Once again, I’ve been accused of pedophilia. Well, to be technical, my sexual identity was called “somewhat pedophilic.” But we’re talking about one of the most loathsome things a person can be accused of, so why split hairs? I’m also regularly told that my sexuality is “repulsive,” “damaged,” and “abusive.” But all of those feel like Valentines compared with “pedophilic.”
Remember last year, when Dirk Loechel showed us a size comparison chart of pretty much every starship you could think of? Turns out there were some missing, so he's gone and made what he says is his final update.
Eyewitness testimony doesn’t really work, and yet our criminal justice system continues to rely on it to a disturbing extent. A short video posted this week by the World Science Festival shows a sobering example of just how wrong witnesses to a crime often are. During a panel on the science ... More »
Lately, directors JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have been competing in the world's most adorable Twitter war of DC Comics vs. Star Wars oneupmanship. And Abrams has just taken the whole thing to a new level but releasing a video of his Millennium Falcon.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet your newest candidate for the world's worst person. In November 2012, 21-year-old Michael John Morlan of Montana was charged with raping a 12-year-old girl repeatedly over the course of two years. Before being sentenced to 15 years in jail, he was out on bail in September ... More »
As the new school year ramps up, teachers and parents need to be reminded of a well-kept secret: Across all grade levels and academic subjects, girls earn higher grades than boys. Not just in the United States, but across the globe, in countries as far afield as Norway and Hong Kong.
This finding is reflected in a recent study by psychology professors Daniel and Susan Voyer at the University of New Brunswick. The Voyers based their results on a meta-analysis of 369 studies involving the academic grades of over one million boys and girls from 30 different nations. The findings are unquestionably robust: Girls earn higher grades in every subject, including the science-related fields where boys are thought to surpass them.
Less of a secret is the gender disparity in college enrollment rates. The latest data from the Pew Research Center uses U.S. Census Bureau data to show that in 2012, 71 percent of female high school graduates went on to college, compared to 61 percent of their male counterparts. In 1994 the figures were 63 and 61 percent, respectively. In other words, college enrollment rates for young women are climbing while those of young men remain flat.
This begs a sensitive question: Are schools set up to favor the way girls learn and trip up boys?
Let’s start with kindergarten. Claire Cameron Ponitz from the Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia has dedicated her career to studying kindergarten readiness in kids. She’s found that little ones who are destined to do well in a typical 21st century kindergarten class are those who manifest good self-regulation. This is a term that is bandied about a great deal these days by teachers and psychologists. It mostly refers to disciplined behaviors like raising one’s hand in class, waiting one’s turn, paying attention, listening to and following teachers’ instructions, and restraining oneself from blurting out answers. These skills are prerequisites for most academically oriented kindergarten classes in America—as well as basic prerequisites for success in life.
As it turns out, kindergarten-age girls have far better self-regulation than boys. A few years ago, Ponitz and her colleagues confirmed this by putting several hundred 5 and 6-year-old boys and girls through a type of Simon-Says game called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders Task. Trained research assistants rated the kids’ ability to follow the correct instruction and not be thrown off by a confounding one—in some cases, for instance, they were instructed to touch their toes every time they were asked to touch their heads. Curiously enough, remembering such rules as “touch your head really means touch your toes” and inhibiting the urge to touch one’s head instead amounts to a nifty example of good overall self-regulation.
The researchers combined the results of boys’ and girls’ scores on the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders Task with parents’ and teachers’ ratings of these same kids’ capacity to pay attention, follow directions, finish schoolwork, and stay organized. The outcome was remarkable. They discovered that boys were a whole year behind girls in all areas of self-regulation. By the end of kindergarten, boys were just beginning to acquire the self-regulatory skills with which girls had started the year.
This self-discipline edge for girls carries into middle-school and beyond. In a 2006 landmark study, Martin Seligman and Angela Lee Duckworth found that middle-school girls edge out boys in overall self-discipline. This contributes greatly to their better grades across all subjects. They found that girls are more adept at “reading test instructions before proceeding to the questions,” “paying attention to a teacher rather than daydreaming,” “choosing homework over TV,” and “persisting on long-term assignments despite boredom and frustration.” These top cognitive scientists from the University of Pennsylvania also found that girls are apt to start their homework earlier in the day than boys and spend almost double the amount of time completing it. Girls’ grade point averages across all subjects were higher than those of boys, even in basic and advanced math—which, again, are seen as traditional strongholds of boys.
What Drs. Seligman and Duckworth label “self-discipline,” other researchers name “conscientiousness.” Or, a predisposition to plan ahead, set goals, and persist in the face of frustrations and setbacks. Conscientiousness is uniformly considered by social scientists to be an inborn personality trait that is not evenly distributed across all humans. In fact, a host of cross-cultural studies show that females tend to be more conscientious than males. One such study by Lindsay Reddington out of Columbia University even found that female college students are far more likely than males to jot down detailed notes in class, transcribe what professors say more accurately, and remember lecture content better. Arguably, boys’ less developed conscientiousness leaves them at a disadvantage in school settings where grades heavily weight good organizational skills alongside demonstrations of acquired knowledge.
These days, the whole school experience seems to play right into most girls’ strengths—and most boys’ weaknesses. Gone are the days when you could blow off a series of homework assignments throughout the semester but pull through with a respectable grade by cramming for and acing that all-important mid-term exam. Getting good grades today is far more about keeping up with and producing quality homework—not to mention handing it in on time.
Gwen Kenney-Benson, a psychology professor at Allegheny College, a liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, says that girls succeed over boys in school because they tend to be more mastery-oriented in their schoolwork habits. They are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They also are more likely than boys to feel intrinsically satisfied with the whole enterprise of organizing their work, and more invested in impressing themselves and their teachers with their efforts.
On the whole, boys approach schoolwork differently. They are more performance-oriented. Studying for and taking tests taps into their competitive instincts. For many boys, tests are quests that get their hearts pounding. Doing well on them is a public demonstration of excellence and an occasion for a high-five. In contrast, Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence that the stress many girls experience in test situations can artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading of their true abilities. These researchers arrive at the following overarching conclusion: “The testing situation may underestimate girls’ abilities, but the classroom may underestimate boys’ abilities.”
It is easy to for boys to feel alienated in an environment where homework and organization skills account for so much of their grades. But the educational tide may be turning in small ways that give boys more of a fighting chance. An example of this is what occurred several years ago at Ellis Middle School, in Austin, Minnesota. Teachers realized that a sizable chunk of kids who aced tests trundled along each year getting C’s, D’s, and F’s. At the same time, about 10 percent of the students who consistently obtained A’s and B’s did poorly on important tests. Grading policies were revamped and school officials smartly decided to furnish kids with two separate grades each semester. One grade was given for good work habits and citizenship, which they called a “life skills grade.” A “knowledge grade” was given based on average scores across important tests. Tests could be retaken at any point in the semester, provided a student was up to date on homework.
Staff at Ellis Middle School also stopped factoring homework into a kid’s grade. Homework was framed as practice for tests. Incomplete or tardy assignments were noted but didn’t lower a kid’s knowledge grade. The whole enterprise of severely downgrading kids for such transgressions as occasionally being late to class, blurting out answers, doodling instead of taking notes, having a messy backpack, poking the kid in front, or forgetting to have parents sign a permission slip for a class trip, was revamped.
This last point was of particular interest to me. On countless occasions, I have attended school meetings for boy clients of mine who are in an ADHD red-zone. I have learned to request a grade print-out in advance. Not uncommonly, there is a checkered history of radically different grades: A, A, A, B, B, F, F, A. When F grades and a resultant zero points are given for late or missing assignments, a student’s C grade does not reflect his academic performance. Since boys tend to be less conscientious than girls—more apt to space out and leave a completed assignment at home, more likely to fail to turn the page and complete the questions on the back—a distinct fairness issue comes into play when a boy’s occasional lapse results in a low grade. Sadly though, it appears that the overwhelming trend among teachers is to assign zero points for late work. In one survey by Conni Campbell, associate dean of the School of Education at Point Loma Nazarene University, 84 percent of teachers did just that.
Disaffected boys may also benefit from a boot camp on test-taking, time-management, and study habits. These core skills are not always picked up by osmosis in the classroom, or from diligent parents at home. Of course, addressing the learning gap between boys and girls will require parents, teachers and school administrators to talk more openly about the ways each gender approaches classroom learning—and that difference itself remains a tender topic.
NPR reporter Shereen Marisol Meraji recently dropped in on a professional-etiquette class for teens to see what they made of traditional chivalry. “I can open my own door. I don’t see the point,” 18-year-old Chiamaka Njoku told her. “Most of these doors are automatic anyway.”
But the young woman took a less progressive stance on the topic of money: “If a man wants to pay for the whole meal, I would not stop him,” she said. Why, as other sexist institutions gradually dissolve, does this one stubbornly hang on?
A survey released yesterday morning found that about 77 percent of people in straight relationships believe men should pay the bill on a first date. The survey, put together by the financial website NerdWallet, polled roughly 1,000 people who had been dating their partners for six months or more.
The company’s survey indicates that, in the early stages of courting, the pressure to pay falls primarily on men, but this imbalance hardly dissolves as the relationship progresses. Fifty-six percent of men foot the bill in full once they’re in an established relationship, and, even further down the line, 36 percent of men pay all of household bills, versus 14 percent of women. There’s not much in the way of historical data on the question of who pays for dates, but the findings of a 1985 poll suggest that very little has changed in the past 30 years.
But in the past five decades, more and more women have become breadwinners, at least in the U.S. Between 1960 and 2011, the proportion of two-parent U.S. households in which the mother earned all or most of the income roughly quadrupled. And in 1977, 34 percent of General Social Survey respondents rejected the idea that men should work and women should stay at home, but this figure was 64 percent in 2010.
Some researchers have speculated about why, even in light of these big-picture changes, the expectation to pay for dates falls to men. “As social roles start to change, people often embrace the changes that make their lives easier, but resist the changes that make their lives more difficult,” David Frederick, a professor of psychology at Chapman University, told The Huffington Post last summer. “Who pays for dates … is one arena where women may be resisting gender changes more than men,” he suggested.
Last year, Frederick co-authored a study larger than NerdWallet’s—one that reached about 17,000 people—which also found that men tend to pay for dates. In the study, he and his co-authors called paying for dates “a rare case” in which women are incentivized not to fight old-school gender dynamics. This same logic might explain why men who are okay stepping down as breadwinners aren’t as eager to step up to the demands of parenting and homemaking. (The scope of Frederick’s study was wider than NerdWallet’s too, and, interestingly, 39 percent of its female respondents admitted that they hoped men would reject their offers to help pay.)
Who’s expected to pay for a date may seem trivial—some would even argue that covering the tab is a form of respecting women—but there’s reason to believe that this minor, “benevolent” form of sexism can lead to a fraught question of what the man is then owed.
A 1985 study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly presented subjects with a variety of fictional dating scenarios—mixing up who invited whom, who paid, and the venue—and asked them to evaluate the acceptability of the sexual encounter that followed. Disturbingly, they found that money contorted men’s opinions of sexual consent. “Rape was rated as more justifiable,” the authors wrote, “when the man paid all the dating expenses rather than splitting the costs with the woman.” Culturally speaking, 1985 may seem distant, but the study's conclusion apparently hasn’t become any less relevant (or urgent): A more recent study, from 2010, found that men were more likely than women to think that sex should be expected when a man pays for an expensive date.
Through all these disconcerting findings, David Frederick still saw one data point that inspired optimism. Almost half of the men surveyed in the study he co-authored said that they would break up with a woman if she never offered to help pay the bill on a date. “In this single telling finding about dating and paying interactions, we see evidence of a sea change,” he and fellow authors wrote.
Ultimately, though, financial chivalry is in need of an even larger revision, seeing as it overlooks the possibility of gay relationships. Steven Petrow, who writes an LGBT advice column for The Washington Post, talked to NPR about this. “In the gay community, you didn’t have that tradition to fall back on,” he said, and he went on to suggest that straight couples would do well to understand how two men or two women negotiate a financial situation without gendered expectations. His rule? "You invite, you pay."
Petrow’s clear-minded approach applies to holding the door, too: “The one who gets to the door first, please open the door for yourself and the person who’s behind you,” he advised flatly. If only it were that simple.
What if we could grow rice and wheat with the same amount of water and fertilizer but end up with 50 percent more food? Sound like magic? Bad accounting? No, just some chemistry and genetic engineering. Scientists have recently figured out the second of three steps to make photosynthesis a whole lot more efficient in plants.
An unruly mob of Ukrainian protesters took matters into their own hands today when marching outside of parliament. Instead of holding signs and telling the man how they felt in a polite discussion, they took Vitaly Zhuravsky and tossed him into a dumpster, adding on old tires and spraying water for good measure.
Remember when President Barack Obama talked about how
re-entering Iraq wouldn't require "boots on the ground" or troops
(other than "military advisers")? Now there's this:
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military's top officer, told a Senate
panel Tuesday he will recommend having U.S. advisers fight with
Iraqi troops against the militant Islamic State group if the
situation requires it.
"To be clear, if we reach the point where I believe our advisers
should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL
targets, I will recommend that to the president," said Dempsey, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff....
Dempsey's statement did not represent a change from Obama's
position, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.
"As was clear from General Dempsey's remarks he was referring to
a hypothetical scenario in which there might be a future situation
in which he might make a tactical recommendation to the president
as it relates to ground the use of ground troops," Earnest
said.... "The president has been clear what that policy
is." He said that the president's policy of putting no boots on the
ground has not changed."
Read the whole thing, including a bunch of blather from Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel. And this, too, from Sen. James Inhofe
(R-Okla.): "It will take an army to beat an army."
This is shaping up like a bad episode of M*A*S*H,
where the brass and pols are so full of malarkey, the rest of us
are just left wondering when the really bad news is going to get
delivered.
"[President Obama's] stated policy is that we will not have U.S.
forces in ground combat,” General Dempsey said, adding, “He has
told me as well to come back to him on a case-by-case basis.”
That's about as open a statement of intentions as you can expect
now, isn't it?
Entomologist/photographer Alex Wild explains in Scientific American how he created this absolutely stunning image of a Sydney funnel-web spider at an Australian venom chemistry laboratory: Read the rest
Well, that didn't take long.
