mycelium
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Fungus headphones offer a glimpse at the renewable future of electronics
It turns out headphones are the perfect product to showcase the potential for growing electronics. The typical set has a mix of plastic, leather and mesh -- not the most environmentally friendly ingredients. To prove that we could swap those out for yeast, mushrooms and other microbe-grown materials, Finish design studio Aivan created headphones made from bioplastics and microbe derivatives.
'Mutarium' prototype is the perfect farm for edible plastic-eating fungi
Biodegradable plastics exist because traditional ones take between 20 and 1,000 years to break down in the wild, often blocking waterways and killing animals as that all happens. That's why two industrial designers and a group of microbiologists have designed a way to break down plastic -- and create edible mushrooms in the process. To be precise, the team (the designers are from Vienna, Austria, while the microbiologists are from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands) created something called the Fungi Mutarium: a glass dome that houses hollow egg-like pods containing bits of plastic in their cavities. These "pods" serve as food to nourish the fungi, as they're made of agar, sugar and starch, similar to those agar plates used to culture organisms in labs.
Drone made of fungi can disintegrate to keep its spying activities a secret (updated)
You know what's stealthier than an ordinary drone? One that can disintegrate when it needs to, in order to destroy evidence of its spying activities. A team of researchers from various educational institutions and NASA Ames Research Center has developed a biodegradable drone made of mycelium (or the vegetative part of fungi), which recently completed its first flight. According to Lynn Rothschild of NASA Ames, once the drone, say, self-destroys by diving into a puddle, "No one would know if you'd spilled some sugar water or if there'd been an airplane there."
Dell to trial mushroom-based packaging on servers, hugs IT hippies
We've already seen Dell embracing the bamboo woods to package its products, so what's next for Round Rock's green fingers? Mushrooms, apparently. Unveiled at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference yesterday is a biodegradable cushioning tray, which is grown -- yes, grown -- out of a mold stuffed with old cotton hulls, mushroom spawn, and nutritious agricultural waste. While it does take about five to ten days for the mycelium (aka mushroom root) to form the desired shape, the merit of such process is that all the energy required for the manufacture is provided by the recycled waste, thus reducing other energy dependencies. What's more, this fungal packaging has already passed Dell's extensive lab tests "like a champ," and it'll soon be trialed on Multipack packaging shipments for the PowerEdge R710 servers. If you want to thank Michael, he'll be in his usual tree house.
