Word: fungi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...well as the highly prized Douglas fir, seemed too inefficient to the Government foresters. Now, perhaps too late, research has shown that clear-cuts tend to break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely to be successful, and it now seems possible...
...jungle out there, teeming with hordes of unseen enemies. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites fill the air. They cluster on every surface, from the restaurant table to the living-room sofa. They abound in lakes and in pools, flourish in the soil and disport themselves among the flora and fauna. This menagerie of microscopic organisms, most of them potentially harmful or even lethal, has a favorite target: the human body. In fact, the tantalizing human prey is a walking repository of just the kind of stuff the tiny predators need to survive, thrive and reproduce...
With so many strange new mushrooms popping up on produce counters, the Leibenstein book is a welcome little treatise. It covers buying, storing, cleaning and cooking all types of edible fungi from boletes to shiitakes, and the recipes range from appetizers through main courses. Most welcome of all is her promise that the book will not send readers scurrying to forests in search of wild mushrooms. The farthest destination is their local vegetable store, where the only thing paralyzing will be the prices...
...like windows into a distinctly shaped but largely unrecognizable world. They have more than a little in common with surrealism; one thinks of the Pandora's box of little involuntary creatures, buzzing and defecating and copulating, that Joan Miro opened in the 1920s. And like those dreambugs, Winters' fungi and spores have a distinctly human air. In their aggregation, they refer to social structures: hives, crowds, nests, colonies. They suggest hierarchies and sometimes conflict. But all this is decidedly muffled, submerged so far in the paint that it hardly works as allegory. Winters does not want to make his images...
Football has been rather too unmellow for the Brownies, who prefer a Saturday afternoon in a damp cave exploring all sorts of new fungi. "Oh, wow, look at the mushrooms...