Extremophile molds are invading art museums | Hacker News Reader

Extremophile molds are invading art museums

scientificamerican.com

153 pointssohkamyung74 comments

I've isolated many xerophilic molds, mostly from caves around the US. As the article stated, the most you can do is spray ethanol on the article and wipe it down. That'll kill most microbes and prevent sporulation.

I'll have to think on this but I don't think there are any easy solutions other than just routinely cleaning and decontaminating the articles (at least the ones that can tolerate it).

Would a high enough dose of UV also work? I suppose it would ruin most pigmentation too, though.

Exactly. UV would definitely work but is also destructive to many kinds of items.

I've got a bathroom mold cleaner that's basically a strong bleach. I'm sure it'd work on the modl, but... yeah.

How about gamma irradiation?

Mentioned in the article as having limited applicability:

"When a mold’s takeover of an artifact must be stopped, there’s gamma radiation—pelting it with electromagnetic energy from radioactive decay to kill fungi and spores. But this technique penetrates deeply and can extensively damage materials."

How about alpha radiation? That will not penetrate deeply.

Mold does penetrate deeply, unfortunately

Does neutron radiation have the same degradation? I know there's neutron embrittlement for metals but do more plastic materials suffer the same?

Consider the mechanism by which neutrons destroy life. It very much degrades most other things as well, much like gamma radiation.

Is there any reason not to do heavy-duty air filtration?

How about keeping each item in its own airtight plastic case?

How about both of the above?

Presumably this would work to prevent infections, but not to eradicate them once they have infected the subject.

Irradiate it?

That's how the mummy of Ramses II was treated - gamma radiation. I imagine an inert atmosphere was part of the process too.

The real issue is that we have created a vast niche environment, lots of peculiar aged organics, in an otherwise "sterile" environment, and these conditions are almost identical over the internal volume of the worlds museums, and things are moved around, from each to each, in little bubbles,microbe ships, carefully protected.

Also there is the "museum beetle".Anthrenus museorum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_beetle

So routine cleaning only works for objects that can tolerate it, and a lot of cultural heritage simply can't

The most interesting part of the article to me was that there's something akin the dysbiosis seen post-antibiotics in the human gut

> Through the 1970s conservators deployed biocides, chemicals—including antibiotics and formaldehyde—that wipe out microbes indiscriminately. [...] But just as broad-spectrum antibiotics can wreak havoc on the human gut by eliminating good bacteria along with the bad, biocides can open the door to even more harmful microbes by clearing out the competition.

> Scientists think decades of treatment with biocides in Lascaux led to the proliferation of a fungus called Fusarium solani that covered the cave like snow in a matter of days. The biocides are also thought to have allowed antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi to grow unchecked in the cave, as well as pigmented fungi that left permanent dark stains on the Ice Age images. In Europe, the use of biocides is now tightly restricted.

This seems to have ramnifications far beyond the museum:

> Xerophilic molds can colonize human tissue in immunocompromised people—doctors found colonies of Aspergillus fumigatus, another mold involved in museum infestations, in one Danish woman’s brain, chest and lungs after she had been treated for leukemia in the contaminated wards.

Knowing nothing about microbiology or mycology, it does make you wonder whether some “benign” outcompeting molds can be engineered, even if strict humidity control wouldn’t be allowed anymore.

This is the best thing I've seen from Scientific American in a decade.

Sadly, that's a very low bar.

It truly is. It's still a very good article, though.

> Yet despite such high-profile cases, experts still believed that true xerophilic infestations were rare, a notion that persisted because the tools to detect them were so hard to obtain.

Up to this point, the tool that was used to detect every infestation described in the article was an unaided human eye.

Submerge them in drawers filled with Argon or Xenon gas when filing them away. This would also help to fireproof the artifacts.

How about a tar pit

Nitrogen should do just as well.

The hazard is if the inert gas displaces oxygen in the storage facility. That can make them a death trap.

Xenon is quite expensive.

Cheaper noble gases exist. And nitrogen will probably be fine.

Or the banks of rivers or in the sea? We seem to find very old artifacts there!

Wow, life really does find a way. When we first find life on Mars we are surely going to wonder if it hitched a ride on our machines. One way or the other we will see life there. The only question is whether it is indigenous or transported.

We seal things, dry them out, sterilize them… and life just adapts sideways

Time to give priceless artifacts a holiday to the Moon?

Idea: For long-term storage & preservation of rare "treasures" (whether they be museums pieces, library books, national archive documents, or whoever), invest in oxygen-depleted facilities. At low-enough O2, nothing aerobic - be it bacteria, mold, bug, rodent, or whatever - can grow. Most can't even live. Gradual oxidation damage (paper turning yellow then brown, etc.) ceases. And disastrous fires can't happen.

It will make retrieval challenging and dangerous.

From the perspective of an archive, library, or museum preservation isn't really the goal in itself, just a strictly mandatory prerequisite. The pieces have to be made available to researchers (and depending on the institution the public) for the archive to be able to consider itself fulfilling its mission.

There is kind of a cost/preservation/accessibility triangle with curatorial preservation, and museums already normally choose storage that is somewhere other than the most expensive/best preservation corner of that triangle. Oxygen-depleted facilities significantly extend that corner, but if we're already not using what we have there then it may not be a useful addition.

Low-oxygen environments also have their own preservation issues. I'm not actually a museum curator so I don't know the specifics. But it is a very complex and old discipline and they've tried just about everything. The problem is usually funding, which unfortunately boils this whole thing down to another boring "you can't solve social problems with technical solutions."

What is the social problem you refer to?

Presumably society doesn't deem preservation to be worth any cost.

There are other considerations as well. We could probably preserve works for longer if we kept them sealed away in darkness, but we value these works in part because of what we get by experiencing them. What we get out of them as artistic works makes them worth taking such good care of as opposed to just being something that's really really old.

Society wants to see these things, and learn from them, even though every moment they spend out in the open exposes them to more harms.

We're fortunate that digitizing has come such a long way. We can preserve and even recreate a lot of things long after the physical objects themselves are gone. It's not the same as having the originals, but at a certain point the reproductions are all we'll have left.

That's what I was wondering. We can't redirect the entire output of society towards museum conservation, so some tradeoffs will have to be made. That isn't a problem, just reality.

When a large book turns into an epub/zip that is under 100kb, what makes the paper so important?

When you add up all the books that were required for our careers, would they be a megabyte?

The little that we understand is uncomfortably summarized this way.

It's hard to measure the information content of anything, because information is fundamentally about differences which matter, and we don't always know what matters. The text content can be preserved dutifully through centuries through copying, then in our time, we find out that what we really would have wanted was the handwriting style of the original, or the environmental DNA from pollen attached to the original vellum...

But even so, there's so much archive material which hasn't even been digitized. I run into it in genealogy all the time. It's in some box in a museum, if you're lucky they made microfiche images of it fifty years ago.

The car guys have done it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stfjVt0AbFU

That was a tremendous video. Cars stored in a robotic nitrogen-filled facility where they can only be retrieved by robots; a two-turbine dyno room; wow. It's wild that places like this exist in the world.

xerophiles can also be anaerobic. Certain Aspergillus can even show certain adaptations for anaerobic conditions. I wonder if we would just be pushing their evolution in that direction

EDIT: Aspergillus penicillioides is mentioned in the article and it can survive in both anaerobic and aerobic conditions

Damn, wait: you mean the random HN commenter didn’t magically solve a difficult problem that has long-confounded experts, simply by bringing their unique insights and thirty seconds to bear?

Maybe the real trick is to have sufficient control over the humidity and atmospheric gases so that as soon as a particular fungal species starts to take root, you can change to a different parameter setting which wipes it out.

I don’t think the art pieces would enjoy that very much either unfortunately

wouldn't the curators need SCBA gear and airlocks?

Turning museums into a Resident Evil house is a cool idea.

You could potentially seal the gasses within the picture frame; double glazed window style

Should be dropping packets of extremophiles into the atmospheres of the other planets to see if anything takes hold.

I.e. practice panspermia.

I know this is an unpopular idea. But it's the right thing to do.

I didn't downvote you. However, there are ethical and moral quandaries to doing that. What if you accidentally wipe out existing, undetected life on that planet?

You aren't going to see anything "take hold" on a human timescale. Evolution takes place over geological time. By the time there's something to observe, there might be no one to observe it. Or all knowledge of the experiment might be lost.

There is no other civilization in the solar system.

If it's humans vs alien slime mold, I stand for humans.

> ou aren't going to see anything "take hold" on a human timescale

Right. Seeding life onto lifeless planets takes a long time, but it is a moral imperative. We are the only life in the solar system, and maybe even in our galaxy.

BTW, the Earth is going to fry in 100m years. We'd better learn how to colonize the other planets.

What? It isn't a moral imperitive because it doesn't matter at all from a human perspective. It's not human vs slime mold, it's weird-specific-extremeophile-bacteria vs slime mold.

The purpose of life is to spread and thrive.

Life is a name we give to arrangements of matter we prefer over others.

There is no intrinsic "purpose".

The universe itself is perfectly content with dynamics over timescales we cannot even approach comprehension of, and never will. The only driving force in the universe is an evolution from a state with heterogeneous energy densities to one with homogeneous energy density. "Life" isn't even in the equation.

Interstellar travel is not possible for humans. Even if we could somehow induce perfect hibernation, scifi style, how do you maintain an engineered vehicle in the abyss for centuries?

Meanwhile, we can't even take care of the abundance of resources here on earth.

What a sad point of view.

Consider that the only reason you exist (and have wonderful things like air conditioning) is because your predecessors did have a purpose.

> Interstellar travel is not possible for humans.

Yes, it is. Transcribe DNA, put it in probe, probe goes for centuries, orbits a promising planet, then employs nanobots to build humans from the DNA. I.e. a seedship.

> abundance of resources here on earth

Our solar system is brimming with resources. All we've exploited so far is just pond scum on the Earth's surface.

The purpose of any particular arrangement could be said to be to proliferate and dominate others, insofar as if it doesn't do that then it doesn't exist and will be overwritten by other arrangements. In this case we humans wouldn't want to spread an extremophile bacteria, we'd want to dominate it and minimize its presence. Human colonization is different from what you're talking about.

If you can get extremophiles to live on other planets, it becomes much more possible for humans to. It's a necessary precursor.

Why? For the foreseeable future we'd survive using a bunch of complicated tech. Not so for extremophiles. How's plopping a couple of unicellular organisms on a planet help us learn to do it ourselves?

More like 1-4bn years actually.

That destroys any possibility of finding out if there was or is life on other planets. Life that would be better evolved to handle the conditions.

It is also unlikely to do anything. The conditions are well beyond anything on Earth. Mars is near vacuum; life has survived in vacuum but didn't grow. Titan has liquid organics, but is really cold and microorganisms don't really handle hydrocarbons.

> That destroys any possibility of finding out if there was or is life on other planets. Life that would be better evolved to handle the conditions.

Those two statements contradict each other.

It's a given that Terran life would be poorly adapted to the conditions. So native live would overwhelm it.

I think we still have some time before the prime directive comes into effect.

Something I've learned is mushrooms or mycelial colonies, always find a way to survive, their ability to adapt to unkind environments is incredible.

Is there a specific temperature and exposure duration at which freezing would be effective? This approach has been used against certain other molds.

If infestations are hidden because they signal institutional failure, it's no surprise these xerophiles flew under the radar for so long

Cold Atmospheric Plasma is a possible way to kill molds on artwork, non-destructively.

I've had to deal with mold more than I care to discuss.

The key is to keep humidity down (relative to temperature). There is a concept of "Days till Mold" growth. Once you're past this number all bets are off.

Here is a chart that shows Days to growth. If museums can stay in the "no risk" zone then artifacts should be good. If they fall outside that zone, then artifacts are at risk.

https://energyhandyman.com/knowledge-library/mold-chart-for-...

Example: At 85'F and 84% Humidity, it will take 7 days for mold to grow into your nostrils and reach your brain.

I'm not sure you read the article, these are molds that love low humidity. Controlling for humidity made these environments more attractive, not less.

The article is literally about how the efforts to keep humidity down have resulted in the growth of these extremophiles.

Wow, you should go tell those highly specialised conservators with decades of experience this. It's incredible that you know more than them! You're so smart.

I'll take the down votes. I think it's a moral imperative to mock this sort of incurious self aggrandisement on sight.

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