I saw a comment recently (source and validity unknown), that it's even more difficult to develop new antifungal medications than antibiotics because it's harder to target fungi without also affecting the body.
But you had 17 years.
Coincidentally, Scientific American has a cover article about the threat of fungal diseases: Deadly Fungi Are the Newest Emerging Microbe Threat All Over the World
Paywalled, but a screenshot of how they got fungus to replicate UK motorways circulated on Twitter and seemed singularly unpersuasive to me, because they were listing motorways that connect major urban areas in nearly straight lines. They didn't replicate something like the M25.
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.
We barely have freeways that get more than 100 feet above the ground.
I feel like my toe nail could tell a great deal about living with a fungus, but it's too shy to break the silence.
But do they have pop songs written about them like, Spadina Expressway (background).
You can plot the most efficient straight line connections between multiple points with soap film. I did it as a project for high school math. So the real shocker is that fungi can pass high school math.
Hyphae electrical signals are quite interesting, I did not know about those. Tips of plant roots are also the most dynamically adaptive part of the organism, and there's the way tree crowns do not grow into each other in forest canopies as well.
There's great footage of the fungus attacking ants.
Especially fuck that one particular ant.
Also fungi can have thousands of reproductive sexes.
I read something the other day, which I typically can't find, which said that trees in a forest exchange information about things like prevailing conditions by using fungal hyphae linking their roots as a kind of telecoms network.
1: Doesn't seem to likely to me. When you are hunting for new drugs, you often screen for antibacterial, antifungal, and cytotoxicity at the same time. There are usually lots of hits for all three (meaning the compound is just toxic in a nonspecific way), many for antifungal and antibacterial, and few that hit one or the other (implying a particular target). Not sure about later stage drug discovery, but that's what I was used to looking at when I did that kind of thing.
This all reminds me of how in the new Star Trek: Discovery the ship runs on a mycelial network drive.
Ants already have failrly powerful antifungal enzymes that allow them to live underground- not an insect guy but my understanding is that ancestor was basiclly a wasp, to enable life underground a specialized gland evolved for ants, metapleural it's called. The complicating factor is that endosymbionts are an essential part of ant adaptation, and those are both rapidly evolving and much less deeply studied.
4/10: Yeah, given that, I wondered why the fungi thing is a big deal. There's some simple physical optimization underlying it. So why use fungi to better understand these problems, when we can just use a traveling salesman approximation or linear programming or whatever? This is exactly what math and computation is for.
A while ago I found a collection somebody had made of solutions cranks made to the Millennium Prize Problems, and one of them was somebody who said that that soap bubble thing counts as a P-time solution to traveling salesman, so P = NP. He even LaTeXed it up, all two or three sentences of it.
I'll get a post up when I get home. Goddamn post-covid kid summer lessons all over the goddamn town.
If only you had someone to help optimize your route.
The fungi piece produced a wonderful letter in the next issue:
The news, delivered by Francis Gooding, that slime moulds can map the Tokyo subway system in a single day has revolutionised the way I clean my bathroom (LRB, 20 May). Until humanity has developed the skills necessary to negotiate with these species, I shall be adopting a policy of live and let live.
I have anonymised it.