Can mushrooms also make houses, clothes and electronic devices?-瞭望新时代网

Can mushrooms also make houses, clothes and electronic devices?

2023-02-02

Fungi can not only be eaten, but also be used as materials to make bags, clothing, electronic devices and even buildings. Such materials are often plastic, renewable, biodegradable, environmentally friendly, and their production methods are more sustainable. What can you think of when you mention fungi? Is it the mold on the food surface or the mushroom in the hot pot? In fact, fungi can not only be eaten, but also be used as materials to make bags, clothing, electronic devices and even buildings. Fungal composites can make "bricks" and "leather". At the beginning of 2022, researchers at Columbia University in the United States developed a fungus-bacterial biological composite based on lignocellulose. The composite material is plastic, foldable and renewable, providing a new idea for the design of biological composite materials. As the issue of carbon emissions has gradually attracted the attention of all countries, the search for more sustainable building materials has been a research topic of scientists, and some researchers have turned their attention to fungi. In this study, researchers fed a fungus with wood waste, then mixed the two and poured them into a brick mold. A few weeks later, the mixture of fungi and wood waste combined to form a dense network, filling the entire mold. After the mixture is removed from the mold, a "brick" that can be used for building is born. In order to verify whether it can really be used to build buildings, researchers used this "brick" to build an arch several feet high. The result shows that these "bricks" are not only environmentally friendly, but also self-repairing. Also for the purpose of ecological protection, animal leather is also expected to be replaced by fungus "leather". At present, scientific research institutes and enterprises from the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland and other countries have carried out research on the production of fungus "leather" and have achieved certain results. The production methods of fungal leather used by different research institutions are very similar. They mainly use sawdust and other agricultural and forestry wastes as the culture medium to feed fungi. The mycelium will spread and expand in the medium, repeatedly branch, and form a network of mycelium groups. Usually, it only takes a few weeks to harvest the true biomass. Then, dextran biopolymer and biodegradable chitin are added to it for treatment, and the finished product similar to leather can be obtained. The researchers said that the clothes made of this leather-like material have similar durability and feel with the clothes made of animal leather, but the production method is obviously more sustainable. At present, how to stably obtain uniform mycelium clump is still one of the main challenges faced by fungus "leather" production. Only the mycelium cluster with uniform properties can provide leather-like materials with uniform thickness, beautiful color and good mechanical properties. The insulation and high temperature resistance of the battery substrate made of fungi In the latest research carried out by Austrian scientists in the journal Progress in Science at the end of 2022, the fungus skin was used as the material to make the battery substrate, and its conductivity was almost equal to that of the current substrate made of standard plastic polymer. Even if the substrate was bent more than 2000 times, it could still work. According to the researchers, the fungi used in their research usually grow on decayed wood, which will form a layer of epidermis to protect the mycelium, that is, the "root" of the fungus from

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