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Mycelium Running – Paul Stamets

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Mycelium Running
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
Paul Stamets

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2005

Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how.   The basic science goes like this: Microscopic cells called “mycelium”–the fruit of which are mushrooms–recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What Stamets has discovered is that we can capitalize on mycelium’s digestive power and target it to decompose toxic wastes and pollutants (mycoremediation), catch and reduce silt from streambeds and pathogens from agricultural watersheds (mycofiltration), control insect populations (mycopesticides), and generally enhance the health of our forests and gardens (mycoforestry and myco-gardening).   In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find chapters detailing each of these four exciting branches of what Stamets has coined “mycorestoration,” as well as chapters on the medicinal and nutritional properties of mushrooms, inoculation methods, log and stump culture, and species selection for various environmental purposes. Heavily referenced and beautifully illustrated, this book is destined to be a classic reference for bemushroomed generations to come. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Mycelium Running – Paul Stamets

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The EPA is making ‘transparency’ look a helluva lot like censorship.

An investigation by the Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle uncovered more than 100 releases of industrial toxins in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The storm compromised chemical plants, refineries, and pipelines along Houston’s petrochemical corridor, bringing contaminated water, dirt, and air to surrounding neighborhoods. Carcinogens like benzene, vinyl chloride, and butadiene were released. In all but two cases, regulators did not inform the public of the spills or the risks they faced from exposure.

The report also found that the EPA failed to investigate Harvey’s environmental damage as thoroughly as other disasters. The EPA and state officials took 1,800 soil samples after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After Hurricane Ike slammed into Texas in 2008, state regulators studied 85 soil samples and issued more than a dozen violations and orders to clean up.

But post-Harvey, soil and water sampling has been limited to 17 Superfund sites and some undisclosed industrial sites. Experts say this is a problem because floodwaters could have picked up toxins in one place and deposited them miles away.

“That soil ended up somewhere,” Hanadi Rifai, director of the University of Houston’s environmental engineering program, told the AP. “The net result on Galveston Bay is going to be nothing short of catastrophic.”

Seven months after Harvey, the EPA says it’s investigating 89 incidents. But it has yet to issue any enforcement actions.

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The EPA is making ‘transparency’ look a helluva lot like censorship.

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Sanity Break: Society Exists Because of Beer

Mother Jones

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When hunter-gatherer tribes began to stay put and focus on growing crops, starting around 13,000 years ago, things didn’t begin promisingly. The fossil record suggests the switch to farming made us shorter and triggered widespread malnutrition and dental problems. And yet, the agricultural revolution ultimately brought forth cities, writing, and what we know as civilization. So what saved the day?

The answer might well be beer, which is really just what happens when you sprout a bunch of grain, thus releasing its sugars, and then grind it into a mush with water, exposing it to those ubiquitous single-cell microbes we call yeasts. Here’s a fascinating National Geographic piece on humanity’s long-standing need for a stiff drink:

Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities—for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi an archeological site in northern Syria, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”

Fermentation—the process by which yeasts consume sugars—doesn’t just generate alcohol and carbon dioxide. It also delivers “all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin,” the author, Andrew Curry, notes. Even the alcohol would have been useful to these early settlements, beyond the gift of a buzz—it’s toxic to many microbes, helping alcohol-tolerant yeasts colonize the resulting brew and pushing out pathogens that make use sick. And that effect “explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water,” Curry writes.

That doesn’t mean you should replace your daily water intake with beer. Most—not all—Americans have access to clean water, and we have a better variety of nutritious foods available to us than those early agricultural societies seemed to. And of course, we now know that tippling excessively courts other problems, including liver disease. And besides, all of these B vitamins “would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties.”

Still, as Curry notes, emerging research suggests that enjoying a bit of alcohol may be part of what makes us human—and it didn’t just help us through the agricultural revolution:

To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging through the trees, however, the ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three other appealing characteristics. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes the fruit easy to locate. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a commodity that was precious back then: calories. Third, its antiseptic qualities repel microbes that might sicken a primate. Millions of years ago one of them developed a taste for fruit that had fallen from the tree. “Our ape ancestors started eating fermented fruits on the forest floor, and that made all the difference,” says Nathaniel Dominy, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “We’re preadapted for consuming alcohol.”

So wine (fermented fruit juice) got our evolutionary predecessors down from the trees, and beer (fermented grain mush) got our early farming ancestors through an extremely rough transition. Sounds like something to ponder over a beer—preferably, an unfiltered, unpasteurized one.

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Sanity Break: Society Exists Because of Beer

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CDC prevents thousands of foodborne illnesses every year

CDC prevents thousands of foodborne illnesses every year

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Humans love drama. That’s why Trump gets headlines, and Kasich doesn’t. It’s why we love Lucy and forget Ethel. It’s why we envy Sherlock and shrug at Watson, laugh at Kel and put up with Kenan. And it’s why for every foodborne illness outbreak that we freak out about, there’s a non-outbreak that we ignore. .

But it’s time to flip the script. According to a new study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prevents hundreds of thousands of cases of foodborne illnesses every year, saving the U.S. more than $500 million in the process. And it does it all with PulseNet — a nationwide network of 83 laboratories that detects and traces outbreaks by sharing information about local illnesses.

Launched 20 years ago, PulseNet is the safe and responsible Richard to Chipotle’s Tommy Boy, quietly trying to keep things together while Tommy loses his shit (foodborne pathogens cause about 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths in the U.S. every year, according to the study). And for the first time, researchers have attempted to quantify just how effective the network is at keeping us healthy and happily scarfing down ground beef and burritos.

To do so, they first identified the two ways in which PulseNet prevents illnesses: by halting outbreaks in real time through recalls, and by instigating “process changes” in industry and government that prevent future outbreaks. Then, using data from 1994 to 2009 on illnesses due to E. coli, Listeria, and Salmonella — the three bacteria that PulseNet has been tracking for the longest — they found the following:

Conservatively, accounting for underreporting and underdiagnosis, 266,522 illnesses from Salmonella, 9,489 illnesses from Escherichia coli (E. coli), and 56 illnesses due to Listeria monocytogenes are avoided annually. This reduces medical and productivity costs by $507 million. Additionally, direct effects from improved recalls reduce illnesses from E. coli by 2,819 and Salmonella by 16,994, leading to $37 million in costs averted.

Not too shabby, considering PulseNet itself costs just about $7.3 million to run, according to the study. And these numbers are likely an underestimate of the network’s total impact, given that they only account for three bacterial pathogens and don’t account for monetary costs due to premature death and reduced quality of life, the researchers point out in a press release.

And of course, we’re partly to blame for all of this — antibiotic-resistant superbugs and E. coli outbreaks are more interesting than an unremarkable brunch — so happy 20th birthday, PulseNet. We don’t appreciate you like we should, but you’ve always got our backs, and for that, we thank y — wait. Did someone just say something about recalled pistachios?

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CDC prevents thousands of foodborne illnesses every year

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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

Mother Jones

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The meat industry’s massive appetite for antibiotics just keeps growing. That’s the takeaway from the Food and Drug Administration’s latest annual assessment of the issue, which found that agricultural use of “medically important” antibiotics—the ones that are prescribed to people when they fall ill—grew a startling 23 percent between 2009 and 2014. Over the same period, the total number of cows and pigs raised on US farms actually fell a bit, and the number of chickens held steady. What that’s telling us is that US meat production got dramatically more antibiotic-dependent over that period.

Even more disheartening, medically important antibiotic use crept up 3 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year—despite the FDA’s effort to convince the industry to voluntarily ramp down reliance on such crucial medicines. True, the FDA’s policy, which was first released in 2012, contained a “three-year time frame for voluntary phase-in.” One might have hoped, however, that by 2014, the needle would point downward, not implacably upward.

Note, too, that the last time the FDA saw fit to release numbers on human antibiotic use, in 2011, the total stood at about 3.3 million kilograms. The chart below tells us that farms now using nearly 9.5 million kilograms—nearly three times as much. The news comes in the wake of warnings from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control that the meat industry’s drug habit contributes to a growing crisis in antibiotic-resistant pathogens that kill 23,000 people each year in the United States and 700,000 globally. Then there was the recent news that in China—which has patterned its meat industry on the antibiotic-ravenous US model—a strain of E. coli had evolved on hog farms that can resist a potent antibiotic called colistin, considered a last resort for pathogens that can resist all other drugs.

Here are the numbers:

FDA

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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

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Entomologists: “Stop feeding corn syrup to honeybees.” Duh.

Entomologists: “Stop feeding corn syrup to honeybees.” Duh.

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It’s time to share more honey with the honeybees that make it.

If you want to a kill a honeybee hive’s buzz, take all its honey away and feed the bees a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup.

Believe it or not, apiarists have been doing just that since the 1970s — feeding HFCS to their colonies as a replacement source of nourishment for the honey that gets taken away from them to be sold.

And believe it or not, HFCS, which is bad for humans, is also bad for honeybees. It’s especially bad for those that are exposed to pesticides, which these days is a high proportion of them.

It’s not that HFCS contributes to honeybee diabetes, nor does it result in honeybee obesity. But it weakens their defenses. And right now, the bees need all the defenses they can get in order to survive.

When honeybees collect nectar from flowers, they also gather pollen and a substance called propolis, which they use to make waxy honeycombs. The pollen and propolis are loaded with three types of compounds that University of Illinois entomologists discovered can help the bees detoxify their cells and protect themselves from pesticides and microbes.

“The widespread apicultural use of honey substitutes, including high-fructose corn syrup, may thus compromise the ability of honey bees to cope with pesticides and pathogens and contribute to colony losses,” the scientists wrote in a paper reporting their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From Phys.org:

The researchers aren’t suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is itself toxic to bees, instead, they say their findings indicate that by eating the replacement food instead of honey, the bees are not being exposed to other chemicals that help the bees fight off toxins, such as those found in pesticides.

Cutting the crappy sweeteners from honeybees’ diets and allowing them to eat a bit more of their own honey won’t necessarily save them in a world doused in pesticides. But it might give bees back some of their natural defenses against the poisons they encounter every day.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Entomologists: “Stop feeding corn syrup to honeybees.” Duh.

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