A Pair of Stories in Such Spore Taste

While a duo of recent science news stories, both of which have fungus as a common theme, may seem otherwise unrelated, I thought that I'd share them in tandem with our Tonic audience, what with my being a fun guy and all.

The first actually neatly follows up on a recent Tonic article. That article described musical instrument research and development in Europe where cutting edge materials science is applied to the manufacturing of composite material violins whose tonal qualities rival the Stradivarius, of which they simply aren't making any more.

Swiss instrument maker Michael Rhonheimer, as reported by Discovery News, has created instruments from natural wood that has been impregnated with a type of fungus that does not actually rot the wood. Recent acoustical tests by experts have deemed these instruments to be sonically superior and more pleasing that the Strads. Scientists theorize that the effects of the fungus on the wood serve to reduce the wood's density and simultaneously make the density more uniform, both of which contribute to unusually good acoustical properties of the violins.

And secondly, not all life forms had a rough time bouncing back after the global mass extinction that took place some 250 million years ago. It has been a focal point of debate among evolutionary biologists as to how many millions of years various life forms required to bounce back.

The "Great Dying" extinction event that forms the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic geologic time periods witnessed the extinction of nearly all marine life, most terrestrial vertebrate life and is the only known extinction event to affect insects.

But as for the fungus, well, the world all of a sudden became its very own all-you-can-eat 24-hour buffet.

As reported by Discovery News, the findings borne out of fresh fossil record evidence serve to cast doubt on previously held notions that it was aquatic algae that benefited most from the Great Dying, as well as the notion that an asteroid impact may have been at play.

Photo courtesy of Ninjatacoshell, via Wikimedia Commons