Word: rossing
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Currier House Masters Richard W. Wrangham and Elizabeth A. Ross will be taking a sabbatical next year. A Harvard Law School professor and a research coordinator at the Harvard School of Public Health will be taking their place while they are gone...
...organic farm just outside Monterey, Calif., a super-eco building material is growing in dozens of darkened shipping containers. The farm is named Far West Fungi, and its rusting containers are full of all sorts of mushrooms--shiitake, reishi and pom-pom, to name a few. But Philip Ross, an artist, an inventor and a seriously obsessed amateur mycologist, isn't interested in the fancy caps we like to eat. What he's after are the fungi's thin, white rootlike fibers. Underground, they form a vast network called a mycelium. Far West Fungi's dirt-free hothouses pack...
Mycelium doesn't taste very good, but once it's dried, it has some remarkable properties. It's nontoxic, fireproof and mold- and water-resistant, and it traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. It's also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete. In December, Ross completed what is believed to be the first structure made entirely of mushroom. (Sorry, the homes in the fictional Smurf village don't count.) The 500 bricks he grew at Far West Fungi were so sturdy that he destroyed many a metal file and saw blade in shaping the 'shrooms into an archway...
Nutty as "mycotecture" sounds, Ross may be onto something bigger than an art project. A promising start-up named Ecovative is building a 10,000-sq.-ft. (about 930 sq m) myco-factory in Green Island, N.Y. "We see this as a whole new material, a woodlike equivalent to plastic," says CEO Eben Bayer. The three-year-old company has been awarded grants from the EPA and the National Science Foundation, as well as the Department of Agriculture--because its mushrooms feast on empty seed husks from rice or cotton. "You can't even feed it to animals," says Bayer...
...mulch in your garden. Ecovative's next product, Greensulate, will begin targeting the home-insulation market sometime next year. And according to Bayer's engineering tests, densely packed mycelium is strong enough to be used in place of wooden beams. "It's not so far-out," he says of Ross's art house. So could Bayer see himself growing a mushroom house and living in it? "Well"--he hesitates--"maybe we'd start with a doghouse...