First, designers debuted leather made from mushrooms. Now you can sit on furniture made from fungi, too. At first glance, the sturdy white stools and beautiful accent tables look like any other piece of furniture, perhaps crafted from wood or marble. But they are far from ordinary. They are made entirely from ingredients much simpler and squishier than you'd think: the mycelium "roots" of mushrooms, agriculture waste, and microorganisms.
The chic new furniture line – a collaboration between Ecovative and bioMASON, two companies that specialize in making sustainable alternatives for consumer goods using a process called biofabrication – was unveiled recently at Biofabricate 2016. "What we do that is unique is that we use biological organisms to literally grow our product," says Eben Bayer, CEO of Ecovative. "In most cases, like when you brew beer, the organism you use is thrown away at the end. But the organism is the most beautiful part. And it is part of our furniture."
The microscopic, thread-like tissue that makes up a mushroom—known as mycelium—is used to make the base of the stools and the table legs. Because mycelium naturally latches onto different substances to help mushrooms grow and form colonies, it can be coaxed into shape around a scaffolding of woodchips or hemp fibers, binding all of these components together as it grows.
Source: http://www.popsci.com/furniture-made-from-mushrooms-could-be-in-your-future
Related Stories
I have decided to submit a story from the hypothetical future, published by New York Magazine 9 months ago, one that I picked while browsing whatever I missed since my last visit on Schneier on security.
If you put your video-game aside, read this article, and pay attention to the left-side notes, you'll discover thingies in the near future history which you may missed when they actually happened — the election campaign was on at that time. Most of the "fictionals" depicted there actually happened; some that I was aware of, some others I wasn't (e.g. water utility hacked).
On December 4, 2017, at a little before nine in the morning, an executive at Goldman Sachs was swiping through the day's market report in the backseat of a hired SUV heading south on the West Side Highway when his car suddenly swerved to the left, throwing him against the window and pinning a sedan and its driver against the concrete median. [...] When the Goldman exec came to, his driver swore that the crash hadn't been his fault: The car had done it.
[...] A third-year resident in the emergency room at Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights walked through the hospital as a television was airing images from the accident on the George Washington Bridge; that meant several crash victims would soon be heading her way. When she got to her computer, she tried logging into the network to check on the patients who were already there, but she was greeted with an error message that read WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR BITCOIN THIS TIME.
[...] One Police Plaza had just reported that it, too, was locked out of the programs it used to dispatch officers and emergency personnel, which made responding to the traffic accidents around the city that much harder.
[...] After a few phone calls to friends in the private sector, the cybersecurity chief got more nervous. At the beginning of 2017, one friend told him, she had been called to investigate a mysterious occurrence at a water-treatment plant: The valves that controlled the amount of chlorine released into the water had been opening and closing with unexplained irregularity.
[...] In the summer of 2016, the hackers received an anonymous offer of $100 million to perform a cyberattack that would debilitate a major American city. The group's members weren't much interested in death and destruction per se, so they declined their funder's request for a "Cyber 9/11." But to self-identified anarchists with a reflexively nihilistic will to power, the proposition had some appeal. Causing disruption was something that had been on their minds recently, as their conversations veered toward the problems with global capitalism, the rise of technocentrism, bitcoin, and the hubris required to nominate a man like Donald Trump.
Happy reading.
[Ed. Note: Just as a clarification: this is not fact, but a projection of something that could easily come to pass. All the pieces of this hypothetical attack are possible. Scary stuff.]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @09:06AM (2 children)
Article date: November 30, 2016
Way to be current on the stories!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday March 06 2017, @09:16AM
Because if it's old, it cannot be interesting, right?
What's next? Asking for FA from the future?
BTW, right now I'm seeing "Only 5 submissions in the queue", so how about you quit whingeing and search for something interesting to submit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @09:42AM
Here, I found you a story from Dec 2017 [soylentnews.org]. Enjoy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 06 2017, @09:53AM (14 children)
Problem is, last time I tried growing mushrooms (on the kitchen table, from a kit, just for fun), the result was a green mold developing after about a week (the mycelium colonized the substrate and developed nice, then the green mold killed everything).
Growing mushrooms seems to be sorta paradoxical: if you take care about them, you need to get your care to extreme (sterile conditions and what not). If you don't care how they grow, seems the mushrooms are quite able to do well on their own - when it just happens the conditions to be right, they grow... well... like mushrooms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @10:32AM
The green mold is likely Trichoderma viride.
A pot or pressure cooker can be used for sterilization. Agar plates inside of a still air box are used to make and transfer clean mycelium.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @01:38PM
Or, let someone else grow it and then compress into something like particle board. I'm sure this is good for "green cred", but to me the pics look like cheap particle board furniture--the stuff that IKEA hides with various kinds of veneer or other covering...
http://www.refinery29.com/2017/02/142697/mushroom-furniture [refinery29.com]
> It takes about a week to produce a piece of mushroom-and-seashell furniture. And lest you think this scientific marvel costs more than a trip to Whole Foods, it's comparable to what's already on the market. A stool will set you back $250 and the table is $699. Both companies are hoping to take this tech even bigger. bioMASON has already created outdoor tiles that are being used in San Francisco. Ecovative has partnered with companies like Dell, which uses its special mycelium foam for packaging and more.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 06 2017, @02:06PM (11 children)
Yes Ecovative is the same company behind the mushroom particle board and mushroom packing foam products from the recent-ish past.
Its problematic because most applications for particle board the non-green product is already too sensitive to water and mold, so its almost like they sat down, acknowledged the non-green products greatest weakness and tried to find something even weaker. In the greenwashing genre of lets increase sales by lowering durability this does work. Basically instead of shipping kitchen cabinets that'll last 20 years and are not biodegradable, you get to ship like 5 cabinets that will decompose while installed in your house when moisture hits them. Lots of non-bio-diesel gets burnt to ship it, of course, and at least five times the profit.
I like woodworking and when the story about their mushroom particle board came around I thought about using it, but regardless of the coolness of the glue used, particle board is still particle board and I'm not going to put labor hours into something made of particle board no matter how cool the resin is.
Personally I think they should focus on the military industrial complex. Imagine a submarine torpedo or mine that self destructs in a month of seawater. You can't have a fishing vessel dredge up a mine or torpedo from half a century ago if it melted down to mush a month after launching. Interesting implications for something like temporary biodegradable hesco barriers, drop a fortress into some farmers field and naturally in 5 years its merely fertilizer to be plowed in. I wonder if biodegradable shipping crates would work for ammo, probably work better than wood crates.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @02:17PM (7 children)
I wonder if it makes sense to generalize "perceived quality", based on the amount of time to create the material?
Off the top of my head:
* Particle board grown from 'shrooms -- weeks or months
* A nice piece of cherry for furniture -- ~50 years to grow the tree and a year(?) to properly dry the wood before use
* Marble table top -- eons of geologic action
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 06 2017, @02:46PM (6 children)
Yeah AC there's at least three angles to work it
One is your combo of conspicuous consumption and compatibility, like I'm not going to apply my considerable culinary skills to fancying up hot dogs or invest lots of labor hours of carpentry into dumpy particle board. I don't have much spare time and I've got plenty of money why work with ugly hideous particle board?
There is also aesthetic in that particle board is hideously ugly by my standards. I like the look of maple. Oak looks nice when properly finished which can be a bother. A nice drying oil finish stain with a couple top coats of poly on particle board is definitely silk purse/sows ear territory.
Finally there is PITA factor where particle board is extremely hard to work with due to chipout basically the cut edges look horrible and don't finish well making some ugly looking things. I love working with walnut. I don't like the look of walnut very dark and I don't like paying for walnut, but I just love the mechanics of working it, if only all wood could be machined like a nice piece of walnut. And the opposite of the joy of working with walnut would probably be particle board.
I made a nice completely dovetailed little bookcase / multi shelf bookshelf type thing for my son out of oak recently and if done in particle board it would seem a waste to invest 5 hours or so into particle board, aesthetically you can't dovetail particle board and if I did it would be hideously ugly rather than a nice addition to the room. Also it would take a lot more effort and sharper newer table saw blades and sacrificial fences to prevent chip out and its just a lot more capital expenditure such that it would be very expensive to make 1 particle board bookcase but if I were making 100000 for walmart then it would actually work out pretty well financially because the material is extremely cheap even if it is ugly and hard to work with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @03:17PM
> particle board is extremely hard to work with
Aside from chipout as you mention, the cheapest particle board includes stones or other hard minerals and is very abrasive. Any normal steel cutting tools (saw blades, planar/joiner knives, etc) are dulled quickly. Carbide tools last longer.
The next step up in price is MDF (medium density fiberboard) which has a really smooth surface to take veneer, and afaik, is much less abrasive. It also seems to have good self-damping properties (high density) so is good for low frequency loudspeaker cabinets (Q. Do people still buy speakers, or has the whole world gone to ear buds?) But people are objecting to MDF also -- http://www.joshuakennon.com/why-i-avoid-mdf-and-furniture-built-with-mdf-and-think-you-should-too/ [joshuakennon.com]
Personally, I've had trouble with MDF and mechanical fasteners, it isn't strong enough locally for wood screws unless the joint is only lightly stressed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @06:19PM (1 child)
The bad wood, splitting horribly: pine and balsa
The good wood: basswood, poplar
Particle board can be finished nicely. Apply a coat of bondo or pour-on epoxy to fill the holes. Sand it smooth. Apply automotive paint.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 07 2017, @12:54PM
poplar
Nice to work, but paint grade only. Weird green streaky. I've built stuff with it, but its best not seen. I bet it would be near ideal in upholstered furniture.
I'm always amused at woodworking sites/magazines/books that explain how poplar is cheaper than oak or maple or walnut it tends to be between softwood and hardwood prices, but you end up spending so much time and money on finishes to work around its problems that it would have been cheaper just to pay for the walnut upfront.
I remember my wife not being amused the first time I bought some poplar all "why are you buying moldy (she meant algae) wood?" Well thats just how poplar naturally looks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @06:30PM
Rant harder, VLM! The progressivists are coming for your furniture!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @09:12PM (1 child)
Instead of particle board, try MDF. If you have to work with "engineered wood".
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Tuesday March 07 2017, @01:20AM
y-e-a-h-m-a-y-b-e-n-o...
MDF has its uses, BUT it is not really a good general purpose cabinet or furniture material... takes paint great, so for some cabinet doors, it makes good sense... pretty dense/heavy stuff, and you do have to use special fasteners if you have something that will be used/abused, cause conventional fastening methods will wobble out eventually... not especially moisture friendly, either... someone said about being easier than particle board on blades, but i don't know, MDF is pretty dense/granular kind of stuff... machines real clean and sharp, if dusty...
as VLM said, particle board sucks, period... realize it is a 'good' (? who knows) use of wood waste materials, but i hate, Hate, HATE the material, even worse than its bastard cousin, OSB (oriented strand board, what used to be called -and i still call it- flakeboard)... but neither of those are really intended for any kind of exposed cabinet or furniture uses, they are really sheathing materials for buildings for walls/roofs... utilitarian shelves, a cat habitat covered in astroturf, etc, sure, but not going to be used on -you know- quality cabinets or furniture...
there is a reason the particle board furniture with vinyl on it falls to pieces when you look sideways at it, it is a cheap shit building material, with cheap shit connectors...
for my own tastes, maple and cherry are two of my favorite wood species for woodworking... maple, of course, is very strong, very tough, yet machines clean and honest, also has a broad range of variations, as far as curly maple, birdseye maple, spalted maple, etc... admittedly, 'regular', plain vanilla maple has too plain a grain for many people's tastes...
cherry is not as strong as maple, but still a good all around wood for a wide range of applications... boxes, bowls, picture frames, spoons and scoops, made all kinds of things from cherry... obviously, a darker, warmer coloration than maple, machines clean and honest, AND has a very subtle cherry smell even with the respirator on...
other than those two, i like a LOT of dalbergia/rosewood exotics, way cool woods: hard, resinous, gorgeous grain and coloration, machines clean, if tough, AND -one of my favorite aspects- since they are so resinous, you just sand/polish the wood to a natural satin finish with no applied finishes at all... love it...
oh, and purpleheart, SUPER tough wood, will knock your fillings out when you turn it on a lathe (especially if you start with an octagon blank 8^), but cool color (it really is a purpley purple, although it will fade to a dark brown over time/exposure to light)...
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday March 06 2017, @02:25PM
A big advantage, especially if I get to make the myself - 'cause this is what I meant by "try".
Changing the look of my furniture every 6 months and using the old one as a fertilizer? Yeap!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 06 2017, @02:30PM
you get to ship like 5 cabinets that will decompose while installed in your house when moisture hits them. Lots of non-bio-diesel gets burnt to ship it, of course, and at least five times the profit.
Well, that assumes that the energy and dollar costs of the fungus-products are the same as the traditional ones[1]. If the fungus ones can be built at 1/5 the energy and dollar costs and/or can be produced more locally then it might make good sense to install something new every 4 or 5 years. There are also costs involved with eventual disposal of the product, which biodegradation would help mitigate.
Also, bear in mind that traditional products rarely see twenty years of use these days anyway anyway because either (a) they are built of traditional materials, but aren't built to last anyway or (b) they are still perfectly serviceable at 4 years old but get ripped out and replaced nonetheless because the owner wants a new colour scheme or something. Note also that (b) encourages manufacturers to trend towards (a) anyway, this could be seen as a way to make the trend less wasteful.
[1] I have no idea what the real numbers are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday March 07 2017, @05:20AM
I had similar thoughts about the mushroom "leather" -- it may look and even feel like leather, but I very much doubt it has leather's primary attribute: durability. Leather can last indefinitely with only a modicum of care, and does pretty well under rough conditions too. I'm thinkin' mushroom work gloves would be basically disposables.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 06 2017, @12:04PM
I used to have some of this furniture until I needed some plumbing work done, and hired these two Italian guys to do it. Fuckers ate my mushroom furniture, stole all my gold coins and stomped on by pet tortoise.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 06 2017, @01:45PM (2 children)
"I mean, dude, have you ever really looked at that couch? It's like something that will make you freak out, man! Plus, you can grow this couch on your own, you don't need to be paying The Man for it."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @03:15PM
And if you chew on the armrest... It's a trip man!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @03:18PM
Can I get a Toad Stool?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 06 2017, @03:48PM (3 children)
I would favor bamboo over this. It grows like crazy because it's a grass. It's more attractive to look at than mushrooms, plus you can eat it, build with it, spin it into yarn and clothing, make paper with it, turn it into musical instruments and fishing poles, and all kinds of things. It's rugged; it can handle hot as well as cold climates (grows in jungles and cold mountains in Asia).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @04:30PM
...and bamboo also appears frequently in traditional Chinese brush painting as one of the "standard" elements.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday March 06 2017, @07:19PM (1 child)
Bamboo is sooo the fashion from 3 years ago... What kind of loser wouldn't want something more current, just because bamboo is hard, strong, and cheap?
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Tuesday March 07 2017, @01:26AM
SWMBO and i were going to get bamboo flooring for the house we built about a year or so back, BUT, when we went to do some esearch on it, found a number of horror stories from Floridians who had mucho macho troubleo with the bamboo strip flooring buckling from humidity...
so, abandoned that 'green' idea, and went with some cheap mill run hickory which looks great, and -so far- no buckling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday March 06 2017, @05:54PM (2 children)
I can accept the leather. Some of it is icky, but most of it looks fine and fancy. But that chair. THAT CHAIR is the most f*cking disgusting piece of so-called furniture to burn its image into my poor eyeballs. It looks like it's made of, well, mold. Like somebody formed a chair from wet dish sponges and put it in a damp basement for 500 years. No amount of bleach could make me comfortable sitting on that monstrosity.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @08:56PM (1 child)
i couldnt figure out what scripts to allow to run
i cant imagine who visits that site normally. must be ignorant masses ok with tracking because this was a wall of text of blocked scripts and the site never even had a chance to display actual html text.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday March 06 2017, @09:41PM
Funny, I had no problem loading the page with uBlock Origin blocking 20+ requests, no problem loading the page with JavaScript completely disabled, and no problem loading the page with JavaScript disabled and all cookies deleted. The only other way I can think of to replicate your issue is to muck with my user agent, which shouldn't be unique enough for tracking anyway. Must be your browser configuration, AC.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?