Bioluminescent wood using the white rot fungus desarmillaria tabescens | Hacker News Reader

Bioluminescent wood using the white rot fungus desarmillaria tabescens

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

130 pointsgnabgib26 comments

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My favourite story about bioluminescence is "angel's glow" in the civil war.

A bioluminescent microbe colonised the wounds of civil war soldiers, beating out pathogens and preventing sepsis.

https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/glowing-wounds

Unfortunately, that story is likely a hoax/urban legend.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/10/26/angels-glow-civil-war...

What a great link. Thankyou. There is still so much to learn from the microbiome. Working with contaminated sites, I have seen bacterial adaptations to the most l nastiest sites, almost always improving the toxicity of the soil. (There are rare exceptions.)

Thanks, but it really wasn't - it was just the least shit of the top five results for "civil war bioluminescence".

I'd much prefer a more scientific article, especially one that delves into the (let's say) caste system of the bacteria - where one of it's developmental forms is symbiotic with a nematode (?) worm, and the other colonises plant roots.

I'm guessing it was more than likely the plant root form (resident in forest soil) rather than the worm gut symbiote - I doubt they'd've ended up calling it "angel's glow" if the soldiers wounds had been wriggling.

The other thing that puts me off is that it's one of a general class of fawning article about high schoolers, when (for one reason or another) what the child did wasn't really that impressive.

In this case because her mother clearly did her homework for her.

Edit:

Plant roots: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/aem.00891-20

Nematodes: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Devang-Upadhyay/publica...

I wasn't aware that rotting wood could be bioluminescent until I saw it myself one night during a walk in the woods. I was familiar with the terrain which enabled me to navigate at night without torchlight. My eyes were accustomed to the dark, I wouldn't have spotted it otherwise. On seeing the mysterious glow I turned on my torch to inspect - it was an oak branch tinged with a characteristic blue color, and very wet, the texture of the wood was very soft. Location: Surrey, UK.

I used to have extremely good dark adaptation and was able to navigate trails in pitch-dark (no moon) nights, by looking away (the sides of your vision are more sensitive to faint light) and sort of defocusing... I'd see the shape of the trail glowing slightly, and I believe it was bits of overturned wood that had been rotting.

It's really subtle. Would only notice it on completely dark nights entirely away from any light sources, and even then, only on trails that had been recently traversed.

Night vision is one of the things I miss most about being really young.

Driving at night used to be fun! And I was easily able to walk around in near pitch black.

Plenty other things can be maintained with good health and exercise, but night vision isn't ever coming back. :(

Yeah, I'm 52 and at some point in the last ten years, night driving became really painful. I don't know how much of it is due to my eyes changing, versus "improvements" in headlights (of oncoming traffic; I notice that old lights have a nice warm dim yellow, while newer lights tend to be a bright cold white). or from grease on my inner windshield :(.

But yeah, it totally turns what used to be a routine and relaxing process into an exercise into "is that a tree or a person dressed in dark clothing?"

I don't think this is exactly what you're talking about, but thought I'd drop a hint for anyone struggling with twilight driving:

Use your visor to block out the sky. It's brighter than the road part of the scene, and it forces your eyes to pick the wrong "exposure." Blocking it helps quite a bit.

Similarly, if you've had LASIK and struggle with halos and starbursts around taillights and headlights, try increasing the brightness of your instrument panel. It will cause your irises to close in response to the brighter light, which allows less light in through the uncorrected area of your corneas. Basically: in LASIK surgery they only apply correction to the very center area of your cornea, and the more your irises open, the more of those higher order aberrations you will see.

Interesting. I had "S.M.I.L.E" surgery about 8 years ago, and I find the opposite to be better for me. At night, I dim my instrument panel to as dark as possible.

It isn't necessarily your eyesight.

I'm in my 30s and have great eyesight and have noticed that with vehicles getting taller (especially trucks) and lights getting much brighter that oncoming traffic can really shine right into your eyes and make driving at night a pain. I'm convinced it's entirely a problem of our own fault that really impacts drivers of normal cars.

When walking in woodland at night in very dark conditions without a torch, another good technique is to look up at the shape of the tree branches silhouetted against the sky - you can often discern where the trail goes.

> My eyes were accustomed to the dark, I wouldn't have spotted it otherwise.

Funny you say that; my partner is a mycologist and her reaction to the linked article was that the luminescence is typically too weak to be very noticeable or useful.

Perhaps they are like me and have additional sensitivity to yellow and UV. Things which are dim or nearly-invisible for most are moderately visible to me, like the Pleiades for an example.

I mean Surrey borders on magical as it is... Love that place

> Unlocking the mechanisms behind fungal bioluminescence could provide an electricity free light-source for the future with a low energy requirement. A battery-free or plug-free sustainable light source based on bioluminescent fungi would be beneficial for the environment and help us meet net zero targets in line with the IPCC synthesis report.[55] Utilizing bioluminescence to illuminate our homes and communities would result in energy savings and a reduction in CO2 emissions. The alternative light source would also reduce nighttime light pollution, a global concern in large cities. For example, bioluminescent wood was used to illuminate the compass and depth gauge of the first submarine, the Turtle, at Benjamin Franklin's suggestion.[56]

Ctrl-F "efficien" => no search hits for efficient or efficiency. Is there any indication to believe these deeply multistep chemical processes to be more energetically efficient than modern electronics & LED's operated at similar radiant powers?

Or is the idea that this can absorb clean wood waste streams? If so all these proposals will need a benefficiency coefficient: i.e. how much LCO energy saved by not simply letting wood rot, such that many competing ideas of what to do with "clean wood waste streams" can be compared; already lots of organic waste streams not digestible by humans or livestock are being intentionally digested by microbial organisms to extract useful protein suitable for livestock...

I'm growing panellum stipticus on some wood and rice right now. The glow is very faint but quite satisfying to perceive. I hope to make a nice nightlight out of it

What do you mean by "on" rice? On the living plant? Or you mean it's growing in a jar of rice?

A bioluminescent wood nightlight sounds amazing, surely someone sells them

https://www.instructables.com/Growing-Mushrooms-With-Rice/

Rice (flour) is a common substrate to grow mushrooms. Make sterilized/hydrated rice cake and inject some spores into it.

I have four bioluminescent petunia houseplants above my bed for that.

I was curious, and here is a video of the product (not trying to push marketing).

https://youtu.be/iaE7EsW-x_A?feature=shared&t=98

Those are the ones. They’re awesome. I put one in a clear pot and the roots glow. https://www.instagram.com/ceejayoz/p/C8_Dgqvuq2C/

Another 'usefull' rot is what forms the incense Agarwood, popular in arab and asian culture, where a certain type of forrest/jungle tree is infected and, after 50yrs, results in the highly sought after perfume that can run you in the tens of thousands $ per kg.

Imagine emergency lighting, that just glows for month, all it takes is some accumulator dust- solar sell, capacitor, piezzo crystal, giving the wood dust a regular stir in a bottle garden.

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