Hey everyone, I'm bored to death and i thought, why not share some of the cool stuff I've found while reading some journals with you? so here it is, the first entry about this.

The radiation eating mushroom.

that is not really a mushroom.

But it does eat radiation.

Today you all shall know about the mighty power of Cryptococcus neoformans. an opportunistic type of fungi that is more than capable of infecting us and giving us some pretty bad pains, pneumonia, meningitis and much more fun stuff. yay.

But this bad boy right here has some tricks up his belt, this fungi is one of the few strand found a while ago capable of eating radiation, the way they do this is by using... melanin,  that's right!, the stuff that gives us humans our color, some people have more some have less but we all have it, this fungi too, what they do is they grab radiation and turn it into chemical energy to survive, this process is called Radiosynthesis.

Now...there's man things that give radiation to some degree, our cellphones, the sun, microwaves etc. However, C. neoformans saw this and said "hold my beer" why? well because he was found eating radiation on Chernobyl.

It has sparked interest in later years because some scientists are working on creating a sun blocker on steroids using these fungi to protect future astronauts form the radiation of outer space, pretty cool right? how? i don't know, I'm not one of those scientists, but they're working on it!

if you wanna learn more, feel free to access this: Fungi found in Chernobyl feeds on radiation, could protect astronauts - CNET 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878614617301137

Malo, M. E., Bryan, R. A., Shuryak, I., & Dadachova, E. (2018). Morphological changes in melanized and non-melanized Cryptococcus neoformans cells post exposure to sparsely and densely ionizing radiation demonstrate protective effect of melanin. Fungal biology, 122(6), 449-456.