{"id":672,"date":"2023-05-11T07:05:59","date_gmt":"2023-05-11T07:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magote.hu\/?p=672"},"modified":"2023-05-11T07:18:04","modified_gmt":"2023-05-11T07:18:04","slug":"hutotaska-gombabol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/magote.hu\/en\/2023\/05\/11\/hutotaska-gombabol\/","title":{"rendered":"Mushrooms instead of dry ice for cooling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Need to keep your picnic cool? Try mushrooms instead of dry ice! Researchers document a remarkable cooling ability in yeast, mold, and mushrooms, thanks to evaporation<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCool as a cucumber\u201d might be better phrased as \u201ccool as a mushroom.\u201d A research team has found that mushrooms and other fungi, including yeast and molds, stay cooler than their surroundings\u2014and has also explained how they stay so chill. The contain a lot of water\u2014just think how mushrooms shrink when cooked\u2014and gradually release it in a fungal form of sweating that lowers their temperature, the microbiologists report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of a neat finding,\u201d says Christopher Still, an ecophysiologist at Oregon State University who was not involved with the work. Mostly for fun, the team even built a picnic cooler powered by mushrooms.<\/p>\n

Walking in the woods during the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins University microbiologist Radam\u00e9s Cordero was trying out his lab\u2019s new thermal camera, which records infrared\u2014heat\u2014as images. He and his colleague Arturo Casadevall planned to use the camera to see how the dark pigments of some fungi influence their surface temperature. During his hikes, Cordero imaged about 20 kinds of wild mushrooms, and all\u2014regardless of color\u2014were cooler than their surroundings.<\/p>\n

Following up in the lab, the researchers found that some species, such as the brown American star-footed amanita, were just 1\u00b0C or 2\u00b0C cooler than their surroundings, but the oyster mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus was almost 6\u00b0C cooler. Moreover, 19 kinds of molds and yeast, including Brewer\u2019s yeast, the mold that makes penicillin, and a few human pathogens, were also cool, particularly near the center of their colonies. Even at air temperatures close to freezing, the colonies were about 1\u00b0C colder.<\/p>\n

The temperatures of the single-cell fungi were a surprise, because compared with mushrooms they have much less surface area per volume, even when grouped into colonies, for losing heat. But the work suggests \u201cthis phenomenon is a widespread feature of the fungal kingdom,\u201d Cordero says. (Only after his team\u2019s initial research did he discover that another team showed more than 20 years ago that at least one kind of cultivated mushroom keeps its cool.)<\/p>\n

By dehydrating mushrooms or measuring their cooling ability at different air humidities, the researchers determined that the chilling effect stems from water evaporating from the fungi\u2014the equivalent of sweating on a hot day. The complex gill architectures on the undersides of mushroom caps increase the surface area for such cooling. Plant leaves similarly cool themselves, by releasing water through pores, but their method is usually not as effective.<\/p>\n

How the fungi benefit from staying so cool is unclear. It might aid in the development or release of spores from the mushroom caps, or \u201cit may just be that this kingdom prefers a lower temperature,\u201d Casadevall says. \u201cThat would be a neat thing to explore,\u201d Still says.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the cool mushrooms can be put to work. Cordero and Casadevall put two air holes in a small Styrofoam packing box containing less than a half-kilogram of button mushrooms, installed a computer exhaust fan in one hole to draw air through it, and put the box into a larger Styrofoam container. With the fan on, the larger container\u2019s temperature dropped 10\u00b0C within 40 minutes and stayed there for half an hour. \u201cYou are not going to freeze water,\u201d through mushroom cooling, Casadevall says. But the prototype could easily keep a six-pack and lunch chilled for a quick picnic, he says, \u201cand you can eat the [mushrooms] afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: Science<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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