Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth.

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

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

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

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

And we know staph can do amazing things.

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

And he had Cryptococcal meningitis.

It's the pneumonococcus now.

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.

Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth.

There are 33 million people living with HIV in the world today.

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

This is extremely rare fungus.

And so I went on to Google, Cryptococcal meningitis, you know.

The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere.

The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates.

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 .

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.

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.

The bottles harboured gram positive cocci, which can lead to skin infections, pneumonia, or blood poisoning.

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

The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick.

So, the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a forgone conclusion, at least in my own mind.

The danger is that some germ like staph will be will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it.

Whether the humans survive or don't survive, these things are going to be living on this planet or other planets.

I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet.

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.

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.

A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand.

In Jared Diamond's wonderful book, Guns, Germs and Steel, he talks about how it was germs, more than guns and steel, that conquered the new hemisphere the Western hemisphere that conquered the rest of the world.

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.

Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years humans, couple hundred thousand.

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.

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.

The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it.