I mean... you're completely right and some of the stuff is as ridiculous as you're suggesting (e.g. the furniture). However... what we're agreeing on is that the fungus is absorbing alpha/beta particles and gamma rays that are coming off the radioactive material, which in theory should mean that it would act as a radiation shield. Whether it's a more effective radiation shield than other options is the big question, and for space travel in particular the question I'd want to know is how effective is a given mass of this fungus relative to other options (e.g. water).

In regards of NASA taking it seriously, my null hypothesis would be that reporters misunderstand NASA just as much as everything else about fungi.

If I understand the linked NASA press releases correctly, they are talking about using a mix of regolith, cyanobacteria and fungi as part of the outer shell of a habitat. The mycelian network of the fungi binds the loose regolith together, forming a strong and somewhat flexible material, with the fungus working a bit like the cement in a concrete mix. And because fungi don't form from nothing you add cyanobacteria that create "fungus food" (presumably some sugar) from water and CO2 (I'm sure you need to add a bit more than that, but that might be beyond the scope of a press release)

This really has nothing to do with radiation-absorbing fungi at all, except for one remark how the melanin in radiation-eating fungi could provide further shielding.

>the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid of them

Please excuse the novice question but I am confused, where does the energy come from then?

Something the fungus COULD do (in a hypothetical world) is concentrate radioisotopes along with some moderator to accelerate the fission process and harvest more energy.

Would probably require a lot more time than it would have, however, considering the relatively low amounts of radioisotopes in todays world (due to the halflife of most of them, and the age of our planet).

Several billion years ago it could have been a thing though!

Also this is how the protomolecile from The Expanse feeds. It can absorb pretty much any radiation across the whole spectrum.

There is a movie coming with Ryan Gosling, I sure hope they keep the spirit of the book and don't turn that into some bizarre hollywoodish cash grab

Just dry the fungus and burn it. The process is fairly analogous to photosynthesis in plants, so we've basically already been doing this since we learned to make fire, just with a different source of radiation.

I had the same thought, I wonder if we could make better solar cells?

Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.

The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.

I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete.

For example:

> Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial

based on what?

Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.

> That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material

Over what timeframe? If that’s 0.05 J per hour and “the researchers found that fungi that faced the galactic cosmic radiation for 26 days grew an average 1.21 times faster” 26 * 25 / 21% and the numbers don’t look that unreasonable.

I also did some back of the envelope calculations. Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law). Now, the radiation from the elephant foot has decreased significantly. I couldn't find a recent estimate, but I would expect it to be at least 100 times lower. So at 100 meters from the elephant foot, the radiation level is a billion times lower than what you get from the sun. There's no way any organism can "feed" on that.

There's another parameter worth considering - how efficient is it to convert sunlight vs. gamma radiation into biologically usable energy.

What if for some reason gamma radiation changes the equilibrium constants for ADP --> ATP?

Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.

Sources dude...

Interesting that it uses melanin to survive, I wonder if studying it in the context of vitiligo would reveal anything given vitiligo is not well understood generally.

You are assuming a molecule good at shielding against UV light is probably a poor shield against gamma rays, many orders of magnitude shorter wavelength. That sounds probable ...

But how about the theory that systems to clean up smashed up proteins from UV light is also good to clean up smashed up proteins from gamma radiation?

And one of the parts of that system, or upregulated with that system, is melanin.

Or sunlight.

... I mean, blind people exits. They can't see their food either, but I get where you're going: eating something with no mass.