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Tiny organisms that covered the planet more than 250 million years ago appear to be a species of ancient fungus that thrived in dead wood, according to new research published October 1 in the journal Geology. The researchers behind the study, from Imperial College London and other universities in the UK, USA and The Netherlands, believe that the organisms were able to thrive during this period because the world's forests had been wiped out. This would explain how the organisms, which are known as Reduviasporonites, were able to proliferate across the planet... By analysing the carbon and nitrogen content of...

At the 27th “Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen” (one of Germany’s most important annual conferences on all aspects of forest husbandry), Empa researcher Francis Schwarze’s "biotech violin" dared to go head to head in a blind test against a stradivarius – and won! A brilliant outcome for the Empa violin, which is made of wood treated with fungus, against the instrument made by the great master himself in 1711. September 1st 2009 was a day of reckoning for Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer. The violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus was...

Late blight, which caused the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and 1850s, is killing potato and tomato plants in home gardens from Maine to Ohio and threatening commercial and organic farms... "Late blight has never occurred this early and this widespread in the United States," said Meg McGrath, a plant pathologist at Cornell University's extension center in Riverhead, New York. She said the fungal disease, spread by spores carried in the air, has made its way into the garden centers of large retail chains in the Northeastern United States. "Wal-mart, Home Depot, Sears, Kmart and Lowe's are some of...

The plant fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s has shown up in Plattsburgh, and experts say residents need to act quickly. It's called "late blight" and it affects eggplants, potatoes and tomatoes. The fungus hasn't made it this far north in about a decade, but it moves quickly and can kill an infected plant in as short as a week and a half. The signs that your plants have late blight are brownish lesions on the leaves which make them look wet. Late blight was discovered in the region at unnamed major box stores on Friday....

The Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, could wipe out more than 80% of the world's wheat as it spreads from Africa, scientists fear. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches the U.S. The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes. Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse outfitted with motion detectors and surveillance cameras, government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants. After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly...

Scientists are trying to develop wheat strains resistant to a fungus that has spread from Africa to Iran and is likely to show up soon in India and Pakistan. The Ug99 fungus, also known as stem rust, is likely to spread worldwide, either through wind-blown spores or carried inadvertently by people, food industry analysts said. "It's a time bomb," Jim Peterson, an expert on wheat genetics at Oregon State University in Corvallis, told the Los Angeles Times. "It moves in the air, it can move in clothing on an airplane. We know it's going to be here. It's a matter...

A newly discovered species of lichen — a plant-like growth that looks like moss or a dry leaf — has been named after President Obama. Kerry Knudsen, lichen curator of the University of California, Riverside Herbarium, discovered the species in 2007 while doing a survey for lichen diversity on Santa Rosa Island in California. "I named it Caloplaca obamae to show my appreciation for the president's support of science and science education," he said. "I made the final collections of C. obamae during the suspenseful final weeks of President Obama's campaign for the United States presidency."

The Uses of Wood Rot Feb 16, 2009 — Wood rot fungus doesn’t sound like a useful thing. Most people would rather get rid of it – especially those who have seen their houses decay because of it. Some scientists, however, are intrigued by it. It may have properties that could some day help power your car...

A fungus found in a Patagonian rainforest could provide an alternative source of biofuel, according to new research. "Many fungi make ethanol, but none to date produce this kind of mixture of diesel hydrocarbons," lead author Gary Strobel, professor of plant sciences and plant pathology at the US-based Montana State University (MSU), told SciDev.Net. A promising aspect of this discovery is that G. roseum produces myco-diesel directly from cellulose-rich products, skipping the fermentation step needed to produce ethanol, he says

A tree-living fungus that manufactures diesel fuel has been discovered in South America. Experts believe the organism, Gliocladium roseum, could potentially be a completely new source of green energy. The fungus, which lives inside the Ulmo tree in the Patagonian rainforest, naturally produces hydrocarbon fuel similar to the diesel used in cars and trucks. Scientists were amazed to find that it was able to convert plant cellulose directly into the biofuel, dubbed "myco-diesel". Crops normally have to converted to sugar and fermented before they can be turned into useful fuel...."

A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday. The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy -- starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies. (snip) "I had never expected such a strong effect on these aggressive tumor models," she said. The researchers believe lodamin may also be useful in other diseases marked by abnormal blood vessel...

ONCE you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century — enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite — will begin to unravel. The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world’s biggest banana exporter. But something larger is...

David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where "crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.” Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said. "The economic losses expected from this fungus are now in the many billions and growing. Worse, there is an intensifying fear of exacerbated food shortages in poor and emerging countries of the world,” Kotok told investors in a research note. "The ramifications are serious. Food rioting continues to expand around the world. We...

A new and virulent wheat fungus, previously found in East Africa and Yemen, has moved to major wheat growing areas in Iran, reports the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization. The fungus is capable of wreaking havoc to wheat production by destroying entire fields...

The survival of the most important cave paintings in the world is in doubt because of a severe fungal infection that spread after an air-circulation system was installed to protect them, archaeologists say. The 17,000-year-old paintings known as “the Sistine Chapel of pre-history” - the Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France - are being damaged by black spots that are spreading at an alarming rate. Fragments of the cave walls have broken off and some colour tones are fading. Now Unesco is sending a delegation of specialists to the cave to determine whether it should be placed...

New Zealand scientists have found what appears to be a cure for the disease that is responsible for wiping out many of the world's frog populations. Chloramphenicol, currently used as an eye ointment for humans, may be a lifesaver for the amphibians, they say. The researchers found frogs bathed in the solution became resistant to the killer disease, chytridiomycosis. The fungal disease has been blamed for the extinction of one-third of the 120 species lost since 1980. Fearful that chytridiomycosis might wipe out New Zealand's critically endangered Archey's frog (Leiopelma archeyi), the researchers have been hunting for a compound that...

It sounds like a fast-food grudge match: Taco Bell is taking on the homeland of its namesake by reopening for the first time in 15 years in Mexico. Defenders of Mexican culture see the chain's re-entry as a crowning insult to a society already overrun by U.S. chains from Starbucks and Subway to KFC. "It's like bringing ice to the Arctic," complained pop-culture historian Carlos Monsiváis. The company's branding strategy — "Taco Bell is something else" — is an attempt to distance itself from any comparison to Mexico's beloved taquerias, which sell traditional corn tortillas stuffed with an endless variety...

'Humongous fungus' takes toll on fir forest Root rot - The world's largest organism is the size of 1,600 football fields Sunday, June 10, 2007RICHARD COCKLE PRAIRIE CITY -- Question: What does the world's largest living organism do all day? Answer: Pretty much whatever it wants. But very slowly. The U.S. Forest Service has adopted an informal live-and-let-live policy for the enormous tree killer it calls the "humongous fungus." The huge root-rot infestation underlies 2,200 acres east of Prairie City in a remote corner of eastern Oregon's Blue Mountains at an elevation of about 6,500 feet near the Strawberry Mountain...

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. "The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they're making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth's energetics-in particular, the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy-may...

The mystery emerged slowly, its clues maddeningly diverse. Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory, slipped a slide under her microscope -- a tissue from a dog on Vancouver Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those. On the eastern side of the island, several dead porpoises washed ashore early the next year. Scientist Craig Stephen, who runs a research center on the island, slit one open. He found its lungs seized by pneumonia and its other organs swollen...

Women's offices had three to four times more bacteria, mold and yeast than men's, in the 113 offices tested recently by environmental microbiology professor Charles Gerba at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It was almost a rout: Women had more germs on their telephone, computer keyboard, mouse and pens. Men outdid them only on desk tops. The women also had a whopping seven times as much mold around their desk drawers. Gerba has been measuring microbes in workplaces since 2001, with a different concentration each year -- such as office cubicles, common areas, and particular professions. This year he...

Statins defend against fungus-caused sepsis Nathan Seppa From San Francisco, at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy When a blood infection causes an inflammatory reaction that attacks the entire circulatory system, the result is a condition called sepsis that's fatal about 40 percent of the time. A new study suggests that sepsis brought on by a fungal infection is less lethal in people taking cholesterol-lowering pills called statins than in those not getting the drugs. Physician Graeme Forrest of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore says that he noticed reports suggesting that statins improve the survival...

Close window Published online: 6 June 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060605-5 Fungus eats enduring plasticVoracious microbe points way to recycling resins.Helen Pearson White-rot fungus normally feeds on rotting wood.Credit: Tom Volk A fungus that normally eats wood can also chew up some of the long-lasting plastic resins that clog landfill sites, researchers in the United States have found. This potentially offers an environmentally friendly way to recycle the waste. Phenolic resins are widely used to glue together plywood and fibreboard, and are commonly found in car mouldings. High pressure and heat are used to link together ring-shaped molecules of phenol with...

-snip- Such adaptations have kept frogs around for millions of years, but a recent checkup has scientists concerned. They fear a sudden mass extinction of amphibians on a scale and pace not experienced since the age of dinosaurs. Nearly a third of the world's 6,000 species of frogs, toads and salamanders are in danger of disappearing, according to the Global Amphibian Assessment. In the past 20 to 30 years, about 120 species of frogs are believed to have become extinct, the assessment found. Human destruction of habitat is one reason for the loss. But there is a new enemy for...

POTCHEFSTROOM, South Africa (Reuters) - What do an old pregnancy test for women and a mysterious fungus that is killing frogs have in common? Plenty, according to researchers at North-West University in South Africa, who believe they have traced the spread of the killer fungus to trade in the African clawed frog, used for decades in a bizarre but effective way of determining pregnancy. "We think we have traced the origin of the spread of the amphibian chytrid fungus to the 'frog' pregnancy test for women, which was widely used from the 1930s to the 1960s," said Che Weldon, a...

Last year was the hottest on record, or the second hottest, depending on the records climatologists look at. The planet has warmed .8 degrees C over the past 150 years, and scientists are generally agreed that greenhouse gases have played a major part in that warming. They also agree that the warming will continue in the decades to come. Many experts are concerned that warming may make two unpleasant things more common: extinctions and diseases. In tomorrow's issue of Nature (link to come here), a team of scientists report on a case that ties these two dangers together: frogs have...

Researchers at The University of Manchester funded by the Fungal Research Trust have discovered millions of fungal spores right under our noses - in our pillows. Aspergillus fumigatus, the species most commonly found in the pillows, is most likely to cause disease; and the resulting condition Aspergillosis has become the leading infectious cause of death in leukaemia and bone marrow transplant patients. Fungi also exacerbate asthma in adults. The researchers dissected both feather and synthetic samples and identified several thousand spores of fungus per gram of used pillow - more than a million spores per pillow. Fungal contamination of bedding...

NEW ORLEANS - Wearing goggles, gloves, galoshes and a mask, Veronica Randazzo lasted only 10 minutes inside her home in St. Bernard Parish. Her eyes burned, her mouth filled with a salty taste and she felt nauseous. Her 26-year-old daughter, Alicia, also covered in gear, came out coughing. "That mold," she said. "It smells like death." Mold now forms an interior version of kudzu in the soggy South, posing health dangers that will make many homes tear-downs and will force schools and hospitals to do expensive repairs.

Tibetans, Chinese Security Forces Clash in Qinghai RFA[Thursday, June 02, 2005 10:16] WASHINGTON — Thousands of Tibetans in China’s Qinghai Province have clashed violently with security forces in a protest over alleged graft by officials in remote Yushu Prefecture, sources have told Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service. An official from the Yushu Prefecture government who asked not to be named confirmed that a clash had occurred in Dzato (in Chinese, Zado) County on May 20-21. But the official described the incident as “not serious.” Further calls to prefecture and county government offices during business hours went unanswered. Other sources, who...

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

Death toll from tropical fungus reaches four on Vancouver Island THE ASSOCIATED PRESS VICTORIA, British Columbia -- Four people, dozens of dogs and cats, 11 porpoises and a horse have died from a rare tropical fungus since it was detected on Vancouver Island in 1999, a study has concluded. The research by an international team that scientists from the University of British Columbia and British Columbia Center for Disease Control also concluded that 101 island residents and visitors have been infected by the rare cryptococcus gattii fungus. According to their report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of...

Ancient fungus 'revived' in lab The fungi (blue streak) were isolated from deep sea sediments Fungus from a deep-sea sediment core that is hundreds of thousands of years old can grow when placed in culture, scientists have discovered. Indian researchers say the fungi come from sediments that are between 180,000 and 430,000 years old. The finding adds to growing evidence for the impressive survival capabilities of many microorganisms. They are the oldest known fungi that will grow on a nutrient medium, the scientists say in Deep Sea Research I. The core was drilled from a depth of 5,904m in the...

Swiss scientists have found what they say may be Europe's biggest mushroom - covering an area about the size of 35 football pitches. The fungus was discovered in a national park near the eastern town of Ofenpass, said the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Countryside Research (WSL). Spanning 35 hectares (86 acres), the mostly underground fungus is believed to be 1,000 years old, the WSL added. The Honey Mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) is edible, but it can kill trees. "The majority of the fungus is an underground network that looks a bit like shoelaces," WSL's spokeswoman Muriel Bendel said. "The...

Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, addresses a campaign rally at the University of Pennsylvania Friday, Sept. 24, 2004 in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

The US Army may have unwittingly killed hundreds of pine trees in an Italian hunting estate. Genetic analysis suggests that the trees were infected with an American fungus, imported by US troops during the Second World War. The Presidential Estate of Castelporziano, not far from Rome, was once home to 60 square kilometres of native Italian flora, including the Italian stone pine (Pinus pinea). Twenty years ago, estate staff noticed that the pine were beginning to rot. Today, a 100-metre barren gash reminds them where the trees once stood. In an attempt to track down the killer, researchers studied DNA...

World-first Australian Truffle FindAn Australian scientist has made a discovery which is electrifying world fungal biology – a new truffle genus related to the famous Amanita family, or fairy toadstools. The Amanita family is famed worldwide for the red and white-spotted toadstools beloved of children's fairy tales, the lethal Death Cap beloved of tabloid media, and a range of delicious edible fungi beloved of gourmets. The find, by CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products mycologist Dr Neale Bougher, highlights Australia as one of the richest centers of truffle biodiversity on the planet. Until Dr Bougher discovered the new fungus in the...

<p>O'BRIEN, Ore. (AP) --  Fire isn't the only thing threatening fragile forests this summer -- firefighting itself can threaten endangered plants, or spread plant diseases.</p> <p>The Lemmingsworth Gulch Research Natural Area would be a wonderful place to cut a fire line to block a huge blaze in southwestern Oregon -- it's wet and flat, without many trees. But when fire officials suggested doing that through the 818-acre site, Forest Service ecologist Tom Atzet urged them to look elsewhere.</p>

Designing Trees The same, often controversial gene-tweaking techniques that brought uspest-resistant fruits and vegetables now have a new target: trees. By Naomi Lubick Image: Courtesy of S. MerkleUNTIL THE BLIGHT, majestic American Chestnut trees dominated many U.S. forests. This image was taken in 1910 in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. To gain an appreciation for the promise--and perils--of genetically modified trees, consider the case of the American chestnut. Few trees have had such a remarkable presence and impact on the American landscape and ecosystem as the chestnut. Mature trees grew to 100 feet tall and their trunks...

<p>Forest pathology specialist Matteo Garbelotto researches Sudden Oak Death in Marin County, Calif.</p> <p>SAN FRANCISCO — On the rolling hills and low mountains of coastal Northern California, green and lush now after winter rains, live oaks, tan oaks, black oaks and madrones have been dying for more than two years. A mysterious microscopic organism that causes Sudden Oak Death has been found on a widening list of trees. Even the stately redwood, a California icon as well as a valuable timber product, may be vulnerable. But a far more troubling scenario is gaining currency among plant pathologists and federal regulators: that the disease will make its way out of California and infect the forests of the interior United States with potentially disastrous results.</p>