Wild and innovative materials are revolutionizing design
Earlier this year, HBO's The Last of Us became a bona fide hit. It's set in a post-pandemic nightmare world, where a mutant strain of zombifying fungus called cordyceps infects humans.
Nearly every media outlet, from Scientific American to Business Insider, was hot on investigating whether or not a zombie-fungus apocalypse could actually happen.
Scientists confirm that while the species of Ophiocordyceps fungus in the series really does exist, our human body temperature is much too high for it to survive in.
Of course, we still get fungal infections large and small, and there's even the possibility of fungal epidemics ... just not the zombifying kind.
But the amazing thing about all this is what mycelium — a network of fungal threads — can actually do. Innovations in myco-technology are providing solutions for everything from fashion to furniture, from cars to construction.
So, to go beyond the terrifying fungus of a hit TV show, we decided to dig deep into the Spark vaults to pull out our best non-apocalyptic fungus story, where host Nora Young spoke to architect Phil Ayres, all about the wonders of mycelium as a building material.
"You can grow it to shape — in a way, you could understand it a little bit like the way in which we might cast concrete to shape," he said, "We can do the very same with mycelium, but doing so by growing it in the space of between five days and two weeks."
Ayres isn't just a lone voice in the mycelial wilderness, there's a whole school of thought around what's called 'living architecture'. Whether that's literally building with living materials or designing spaces and products that mimic living things.
Furniture from the ground up
In 2015, we spoke to Gavin Munro, an artist and designer who grows furniture in an orchard near Derby, England.
"I thought, why are we growing trees and cutting them down when we could just grow them into the shapes that we want?" he told Spark host Nora Young.
To do that, Munro and his wife Alice use the traditional technique of coppicing.
"Some trees, when you cut them down, they'll send up shoots from the bottom. And we use those because those new shoots are stronger," he explained, "We train those shoots along frames, prune them and shape them as they're growing along and then at a certain point we'll harvest them and dry them out. And from there you can finish them in any number of ways."
Each piece they grow is unique, and many have been displayed in galleries and museums around the world.
"There's a kind of beauty with the way they can be made, and it's sort of nice to represent a bit of cooperation with nature rather than dominate over it."
Music of the trees
In 2012, Bartholomäus Traubeck, an installation artist in Germany, was on Spark to talk about his project "Years," a record player that translates tree ring data into music.
Traubeck used basic consumer tech to do this, including the camera from a PlayStation 3. Through the camera, the player takes the data from the tree rings and translates it into piano music using a specific algorithm.
"The date of the tree rings serves as a basis for these piano compositions," he said. "The machine calculates the aberrations from the perfect circular shape, and these aberrations, together with the width and the darkness of the tree ring are then calculated into a piano melody."
A smart bridge powered by the tides
Innovative, sustainable, living architecture isn't only about the materials used. It can also mean a building that responds and adapts to its inhabitants.
In 2017, Young spoke to Erin Santini-Bell about "The Living Bridge Project".
Santini-Bell and her team outfitted a bridge in New Hampshire with sensors that can monitor everything from structural stability to weather conditions. Rather than plug all of the sensors into the grid, turbines underneath the bridge convert tidal currents to electrical energy that powers the sensors.
"This bridge is such a unique structure that there is so much we can learn from it," she said. "We're looking at it as an entire ecosystem of its own, in its environment."
Today, the Living Bridge is successfully self-monitoring, self-reporting and posting updates on Instagram.
From living bridges to living hard drives
Back in 2012, long before the release of her climate change anxiety book, Generation Dread, broadcaster and researcher Britt Wray was on Spark to talk about the possibility of storing digital files in living cells.
In the decade since we aired Wray's documentary, there have been many developments in DNA hard drives. In 2017, scientists at MIT stored a gif inside a genome of E.coli bacteria.
In 2020, Netflix stored the first episode of their German series Biohackers in DNA.
And in 2021, researchers at Columbia University electrically encoded the message "Hello world!" directly into living cells.
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