I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium.

60,000 species are known to science, but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist.

Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe cleaning polluted soil, making insecticides, treating smallpox and even flu ... a href http www.ted.com index.php speakers view id 229 target _blank Read more a .

Consider the fungi including mushrooms, rusts, molds and many disease causing organisms.

Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms true bacteria and one celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to.

Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi.

I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi fungi that kill insects.

You're just a fungus!

Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

So, fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates.

This is extremely rare fungus.

The Life Box you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom.

The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars.

More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light.

Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth.

The Armillaria is actually a predatory fungus, killing certain species of trees in the forest.

A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta a super kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together.

The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection.

Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom.

The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology.

I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other.

So, I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites.

So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it.

I'm essentially using a kombucha recipe, which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria, yeasts and other micro organisms, which spin cellulose in a fermentation process.

And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species.

Sunshine, an American jurist once observed, is the best disinfectant.

And from the results of the same competition last year, a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off.

And along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria, streptococcus and boom, they get a bacterial pneumonia.

Most contaminants are coliform bacteria and faecal streptococcus, and among chemical ones, there are ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, rare heavy metals and other toxic agents.

These are hacks, and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are, current consensus, six kingdoms. Six different broad approaches the plants, the animals, the fungi, the protests the little things the bacteria and the Archaea bacteria. The Archaeas.

This is a really odd one. This is Ferroplasma.

70. The UNU Brucellosis Research Network project has two objectives.

She suspected the difference had to do with the mice's gut microbiomes the community of bacteria, viruses and fungi that normally live within the gastrointestinal tract.

The enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates fungal sugars.

So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual.

Here you see a typical cucumber leaf that turned actually from green to black because of a black fungus, sooty mold, which is covering it.

These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria and the result is new soil.

At the end of 1987, the scope of the biological weapons work was further expanded and research into additional bacterial agents, such as Clostridium perfringens and fungal toxins, such as trichothecene mycotoxins, was carried out.

And we know staph can do amazing things.

I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications.

First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism.

Fungi multiplied. Orchids emerged, genitalia shaped to lure insects ...

Irrigation encourages the growth of stem rust fungi like UG 99