The article says that we're still not sure how the fruit reproduces. With all this money on the line, how is it that nobody has figured this out?
"Because truffle fungi produce their sexual fruiting bodies under ground, spores cannot be spread by wind and water. Therefore, nearly all truffles depend on mycophagous animal vectors for spore dispersal."
The truffle is full of spores. Because it is underground it can only spread far if something or someone digs it up and tries to eat it.
"When the ascospores are fully developed, the truffle begin to exude volatile compounds that serve to attract animal vectors."
The truffle smells good so something or someone finds it and digs it up.
The trick is that humans only care about a few species of mushrooms as truffles. You spread the spores of one of these good species around the roots of a tree sapling you plant and then you hope that it will establish a good healthy colony. If for any reason some other mushroom species outcompetes your truffle species you won't have any truffles. And it takes multiple years to know if that happened or not. So any experimentation in finding the right method or the right conditions to promote the truffle species and discourage the other species goes at a snail's pace.
Ps: Excelent work on the fjords, they turned out really pretty.
- we could make a genetically modified truffle fungi which glows in the dark. Now, why would that help? The problem with monitoring the health of your fungi is that most of the body mass of it is in the form of tiny thread like stuff called mycelium. Even if you take a soil sample it is kinda hard to tell the mycelium of the right species apart from the wrong ones. With some species experts can tell them apart under microscope but the only sure way to tell what fungi’s mycelium you are looking at is to DNA sequence it. Which is expensive thus rarelly done. But if you could make your target specie glow under UV light it would make the analysis that much simpler and cheaper. So we could do it more often and thus learn about what factors favour our truffle faster.
- The other option would be to engineer a kind of “immune system” to our truffle species. Basically to make “nanobots” which leave our truffle but kill other fungi. Now how on earth would one do something like that? I would start by trying to modify mycoviruses (the kind of viruses which attack fungi). Many of them are already quite picky about what kind of fungi they infect, so probably that would help us. Bonus points if we can engineer the virus such that it dies out in nature after a few rounds of reproduction so we can minimize the chances of an escape.
Of course both of these ideas are very speculative, scifi level conceptual stuff. :)
Truffled to death.
I remember looking at old newspapers in the game, and it looks like the fungus was on crops. And I think there were allusions that the fungus was the same on which controls ants, but mutated.
Very fun game.
This should be a top priority or you're describing the beginning of the next disaster/distopian movie.
-add a fungicide resistance gene into your truffle strain. Inoculate your tree with this GMO strain, treat the soil regularly with appropriate fungicide. This will kill off the competing fungi, leaving only your strain.
Possibly, that’s even throughout the yearS. Mast happens “at irregular periods of 2–12 years” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)) and we don’t really understand that, either.
Couldn't you just do some chemical analysis to verify if your desired fungi is present in the roots?
It'd be like trying to understand how plants grow without being able to see or measure light.
We only discovered these proteins in 1996.
Vanilla was not successfully pollinated by humans until 1841, which meant that it did not grow outside of the natural range of its pollinator in Mexico (and only a very small region of Mexico.) And today most vanilla does not come from vanilla beans but is synthesized from petrochemicals, because vanilla's pollination is still ridiculously expensive.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-st...
I know of blunt statements and blunt/blunted knife blades but maybe I misunderstood your usage of the word. Care to explain?
We're not selling penis mightiers
Well you're sitting on a goldmine Trebek"
It's not clear to me this is true. I think there may be some niche market, but I think most men wouldn't even consider something like this.
A few people mentioned viagra, which has made a lot of money, but that's not about size.
I remember reading a long time ago that there is some kind of "enlargement" surgery available, but that the motivation is almost exclusively the "locker room" rather than a sexual issue.
Anyway, I'm sure that an invention as you describe may be interesting to some niche, but I don't believe it's one of the worlds burning problems, which is why it hasn't had any serious study.
Otherwise, I was serious, I don't think penis enlargement is high enough on most people's priorities that the field attracts any real R&D investment.
girth is doable, length, not so much, is my understanding.
Also, one of the issues with minoxidil is that it is a prodrug, the active form is minoxidil sulfate, and some people don't express sulfotransferase as much in the skin to be able to make that conversion. If minoxidil doesn't work for you, then you want to either use oral minoxidil (the liver will activate it to minoxidil sulfate, the side effect of that is you will have enhanced hair growth through your entire body), or a compounded topical that has tretinoin, since that helps upregulate sulfotransferase in the skin.
I don't have an opinion on how often minoxidil should be applied, but your reasoning here is wrong. If the treatment works when a particular concentration is maintained, you could absolutely need to apply a drug with a half-life of 22 hours twice a day.
For example, many anti-depressants have half-lives of a few days, but patients still take them once or even twice a day.
The only relationship between half-life and daily dose is initial ramp-up vs sustained treatment. That is, a treatment usually has a targeted amount of a substance being maintained in the body during the sustained treatment, and then the ramp-up and any adjustment needs to be done taking into consideration that the pill you took yesterday may still be 3/4 still in your body today.
The trouble is, once hair loss is visually noticeable you've already lost about 50% density, and most people don't notice their hairline slowly receding.
For some people its not.
The point remains though, if you were able to know that you would go bald, and started taking finasteride or dutasteride before noticeable hair loss starts, that would likely be sufficient for life.
I remember Bill Gates in some video said that pharma companies spend lots of money on research to prevent hair loss, grow hair compared compared to research on diseases like malaria etc.
Well if he says it.
> Gates answers, "No," which by itself could be interpreted as him standing up for intellectual property law and refusing to share vaccine formulas with developing nations. But then Gates goes on to answer the inevitable follow up question: "Why not?"
> The reason, Gates said, is due to the complexity of manufacturing safe vaccines.
> "There are only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines," he said. "The thing that's holding things back in this case isn't intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You've gotta do the trials on these things. And every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way."
> Moreover, Gates said getting COVID vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson to share vaccine formulas has already happened — such as the case with India.
> "We got all the rights from the vaccine companies," he said. "They didn't hold it back, they were participating."
(I’m not saying it’s wasteful, learning the secrets of truffle reproduction could unlock a new branch of scientific study. Just explaining why this is.)
Coke is all about marketing not the taste.
When they say, "nobody knows" it means that nobody who does know is talking.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that there are people that have figured out how to increase yields in the wild or simulate correct growing conditions
And when they got one, they ate it. I would have thought maybe breaking it up and I dunno, planting it or spreading it around might be a good idea.
Eating the truffe instead is advertisement and creating a net of future exigent customers.
For chefs is also an opportunity to verify that you have exactly the right stuff. There are other types of truffe that grow in Corylus and have a much lower market value.