There's no denying it, mushrooms are pretty great to eat.
But here's something you might not have known: Some mushrooms are also great for hammering on the outside of transatlantic 787 Dreamliners!
Here's one more reason to love a good mushroom: one day, you might be able to make headphones, memory foam for shoes, or even aircraft exoskeletons with it. Researchers just assessed the engineering possibilities with one particularly impressive mushroom and found that it might be able to replace plastic in a whole bunch of different use cases.
Anything that might make an airplane wing stronger, I'm for it. That kind of infrastructure is nothing to play around with.
For real, though, the applications of this fungus seem incredible, almost limitless:
The fungus Fomes fomentarius is the focus of new research published today in the journal Science Advances. It has the remarkable ability to yield a wide range of materials with different properties — from soft and spongelike to tough and woody. By studying the architecture of the mushroom, researchers hope to pave the way for it to become a more sustainable building block of our lives. ...
What's unique about this fungus is that it has three layers with distinct properties that could each be useful in different ways. There's a very tough outer crust that could be used to make impact-resistant coating for windshields, for example. Then, according to Mohammadi, there's a soft middle layer that feels good on the skin and could replicate leather. The third inner layer is similar to wood. The research team used advanced imaging techniques and mechanical strength tests to study each layer and assess their potential uses.
Glass, leather, wood, plastics — pretty much most of the stuff we use in daily life.
Here's a neat video exploring some of the possibilities behind this (literally) growing technology:
I love the cutting edge of scientific exploration at play here: Hitting a mushroom brick with a propane torch to see if it will insulate the heat from a chocolate bar on the other side:
