HN Explorer

22 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] thread
WalterGR
> First ever global mapping of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi shows scale of hyphal systems that sustain plant life

Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48209905 - "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success" (pacifichorticulture.org)

153 points | 26 days ago | 50 comments

mkl
100×10^12 km is about 10.6 light years. There are about 16 other stars closer to the sun than that. It's a bit like a human body containing blood vessels with total length greater than twice the Earth's circumference.
waterTanuki
The map looks off. No way the American Southwest has 3 meters per cm cubed of fungal density in such an arid region. Plenty of desert.
contingencies
Interesting how deeply east coast Australia is colored. I live in Sydney, a city of 5.6 million humans, and yet my yard apparently has at least the following fungi I can identify to species level: Aseroe rubra (alien thing with tendrils), Astraeus hygrometricus, Cladia aggregata, Coprinellus disseminatus, Coprinellus micaceus, Cruentomycena viscidocruenta, Flavoparmelia caperata, Heterodea muelleri, Hypholoma fasciculare, Leratiomyces ceres, Mycena tenerrima, Myriostoma australianum, Omphalotus nidiformis (glows in the dark), Panellus luxfilamentus, Satyrus rubicundus (looks like a red penis), Scleroderma cepa, Scleroderma citrinum, Trametes coccinea, Trametes versicolor, Usnea hirta.
N_Lens
I believe Planet will talk to us if we are willing to listen. These fungal stalks behave as multistate relays: taken together, the neural net connectivity must be staggering. Can a planet be said to have achieved sentience?

- Lady Deirdre Skye, Planet Dreams, Alpha Centauri

jmuguy
Meanwhile she's using mind worms as police. I would love for Firaxis to revisit Alpha Centauri.
TrackerFF
Say you have a filament that's 1 µm in diameter, and 1 meter long. You want to fill up a 1m^3 (1m W x 1m H x 1m L) space with these, how many of these can you place in such a space? Over a trillion! And thus, the combined km length of these will also be over a billion km. At such small scales things can become very long when summed up.
euroderf
How would this compare with packing the volume with DNA ?
gettingoverit
550,000 km/mm^3,

or 180 m^3 for the whole 100 quadrillion km thing.

augusto-moura
It is obvious when you think that 3d volumes scale cubicly and 1d lengths scale linearly. Adding another 1 meter to a cube of said filaments would increase the total length by a power of 3!
reliablereason
If you have a number that is 1000^90000000 that number is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
kolinko
So around the length of the coastline of UK.
metalman
there was other work done on nemetodes, that are all over the planet, in glaciers, deap ocean, in rock far underground, etc, where someone did a representation of the earth, but with everything but the nemetodes removed, my speculation is that a large part of nemetode and mycylium networks, overlap.
xvxvx
I read to the part where they used machine learning to get the results and lost all faith in this being accurate at all.
estetlinus
Are they trying to say its ChatGPT?
jakzurr
The article is still pretty cool, even though the discussion brings up some issues with their arithmetic.
rglover
Learning that trees use mycelium like their own internet to communicate about where resources are was my first real..."oh man, I feel small" moment. Even crazier to think about when the scale of the network starts to get quantified.