Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

AlanYx•about 1 hour ago

The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.

These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.

Forgeties79•about 1 hour ago

Wow you weren’t kidding that’s a beautiful color

inigyou•13 minutes ago

You can buy this color for 3€/meter at any weekend fabric market.

dustfinger•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if there is a health hazard wearing this due to breathing in spores or toxins released into the air? Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin? Very interesting none the less. I have imagined humans making living clothes for a long time, so it is nice to see that idea materialize.

svachalek•about 1 hour ago

It seems telling that none of the photos show anyone wearing it.

juancn•about 1 hour ago

How does it smell though?

ComputerPerson•about 1 hour ago

Most people associate mushrooms and fungi with the smell of their substrate; they commonly don't have a strong smell themselves

I doubt it has a smell stronger than the wearer

edit: this is a bad take, upon further research

_whiteCaps_•about 1 hour ago

Chanterelles smell great. I would wear something that smelled like that.

Pine mushrooms, not so much.

fluoridation•31 minutes ago

I've done cultures on agar agar and mycelium definitely does have a distinctive smell. To me it's reminiscent to the damp smell of a concrete basement, though less stale and unpleasant.

andai•about 1 hour ago

Could they make a house out of this?

bastawhiz•1 minute ago

It doesn't seem to have the rigidity to be structurally sound for construction.

josefritzishere•about 1 hour ago

Is there an adjective for something that's nifty but also gross?

sdellis•about 1 hour ago

Blursed!

kibwen•about 1 hour ago

I'm not sure it's any more objectively gross than normal textile materials. Imagine you lived in a hairless, furless world where nothing like wool was a thing, and then suddenly we discovered a weird fluffy mammal that extruded long fibers out of its flesh; the people of that world might call that gross, we'd just call it ordinary.

chrisjj•about 1 hour ago

> nutrient solution is applied over a hole, along with a small patch of fresh fungus

So, not repair itself.

dustfinger•about 1 hour ago

To be fair it only claimed "near self-repairing".

cestith•about 1 hour ago

One could think of it as mostly self-repairing with some outside encouragement.

soiltype•about 1 hour ago

The headline is more ambitious, that's probably what they meant

chrisjj•about 1 hour ago

Nope. "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself".

andai•about 1 hour ago

Does the fresh fungus need to be genetically identical? I read something about mycelial nuclei in high school and it was weird.

fluoridation•27 minutes ago

I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

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