I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra.
- If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture
- That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material.
- Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial ≈ 3.15 kJ
10% of that is 315 J per gram
The result is that:
The amount of radiation energy available is 4 orders of magnitude too small
to power even a 10% growth boost.
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.
They don't eat the radioactive material and make it not radioactive.
[Assuming they use the radiation to get energy [1].] They just wait patiently until the radioactive atoms decay and emit radiation, like a gamma ray, and then absorb the gamma ray and use the energy. The half life of the radioactive material does not change.
[1] I still doubt this claim, but let's go along assuming the best case.
Consider when organisms must pass, that these ancient fungi likely still consume the host... Thus, on a 8000 year timescale most fungi doesn't necessarily need to pursue food that naturally dies in around a century.
Yeasts are already sharing your body along with numerous other organisms that are often harmless or even beneficial. Best not think about it too much if you are uncomfortable with seeing yourself as a mini ecosystem. =3
rivals the aspen grove "Pando" as the known organism with the highest living biomass and perhaps rivalled by a colony of Posidonia australis on the Australian seabed that measures 200 square kilometres (edited)
I'm trying to work out how the fungus evolves to grow its food source by causing radioactivity increase?
It can concentrate radionuclides, but the step function after inducing some criticality is likely to cause reproductive difficulty (stopping fungus evolution).
Plus: heavy metals combined with organics have a tendency towards being nasty poisonous
I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.
I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.
But as they say, writing is hard. :)
My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.
I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.
There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.
I had a similar thought, ideas are cheap. Loads of people are like "I have this GREAT idea for an app, I just need a developer to build it!"... as if the idea on its own has value.
Unfortunately and / or fortunately thanks to AI tech, anyone with an idea can now throw it at an AI and see it materialise.
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete.
For example:
> Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial
based on what?
Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.
If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.
The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"
You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.
> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).
> It was really just food for thought.
It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.
Um right did not think of that, if you burn a organism you get to core components but the organism was not originally made of the core components.
The core idea was not generated from a chat bot. Neither was the article i gave (that was my own googling).
The core idea (that there is a requirement and a availability of energy that may differ) was generated from my brain not that i personally think the origin of an idea matters to its value.
General rule of thumb: If you're going to ask an LLM and then make a post based on that, simply don't post it. If we wanted a randomly generated take on this, we would just ask an LLM ourselves.
Another hypothesis to test would be if the radiation is being used as a catalyst somehow.
E.g. Could be denaturing something else, unlocking a previously inaccessible energy source. Possibly some radiochemistry creating a new food source for the fungus too.
I also did some back of the envelope calculations. Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law). Now, the radiation from the elephant foot has decreased significantly. I couldn't find a recent estimate, but I would expect it to be at least 100 times lower. So at 100 meters from the elephant foot, the radiation level is a billion times lower than what you get from the sun. There's no way any organism can "feed" on that.
> Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law).
No, the elephants foot isn’t a point source at its surface.
To use an extreme example going from 1m away from the sun to 100m away from the sun doesn’t result in a 10,000x drop off in energy density. Instead the exponential drop-off occurs relative to the center of the sun because energy is coming from any point on the surface visible to that location. A similar principle applies with the elephants foot, though the geometry is more complicated.
I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.
I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concrete.
As to a point source, if you’re making an approximation use the center of the object and your 100m distance calculation would be corrected by about 25x. Though obviously the building itself provides shielding.
I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower.
In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun, and therefore fungi can't "feed" on it, because this energy is nowhere near enough to sustain life?
> Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun
Yes, the elephants foot is not the only radiation source at Chernobyl making your calculation meaningless in practice.
You’re making such a huge range of incorrect assumptions here and I was trying to correct some of them. I’m honestly done with this conversation but it’s worth remembering that order of magnitude calculates can be off by 100,000 fold when you make the wrong assumptions.
Also, Wikipedia itself says the reading was from 8 months after the accident. “At the time of its discovery, about eight months after formation, radioactivity near the Elephant's Foot was” The falloff from 8 months post accident to now isn’t actually that large because even iodine 131 had already seen 30 half lives at that point the really nasty stuff was already gone and the reasonably long lived stuff is what was left.
Finally, fungi get by on way less energy than plants do from photosynthesis it’s really not a particularly meaningful benchmark.
> That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material
Over what timeframe? If that’s 0.05 J per hour and “the researchers found that fungi that faced the galactic cosmic radiation for 26 days grew an average 1.21 times faster” 26 * 25 / 21% and the numbers don’t look that unreasonable.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.
Yes, its not learned "knowledge" it is evolved. Mammals are born with systems primed to fear things that look like snakes. Not cause their parents learned that snakes are dangerous but cause the parents that was born without those priming circuits died.
I don’t think it’s things like ‘fear snakes’. He’s observing structure and concluding it’s meaningful instruction. It’s instead base layers of cognition, meta cognition.
All research points to ADHD having multiple causes. Each case will have a specific causal pattern. This makes sense as it is a diagnosis defined by symptoms. Same with autism.
Attachment Styles is a very low dimensional way of observing something that has very high dimensionally.
When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get problematic outcomes.
This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.
It might be that general happiness is influenced largely by genetic factors, and not as much by contextual ones.
One could assume that higher intelligence gives you more power to shape your context — but that doesn’t help much if context itself doesn’t play a major role in determining general happiness.
The depressed person was probably born with a bias toward depression, and the happy person with a bias toward happiness. The interesting question then becomes: what mediates the path from genes to happiness? It’s unlikely to only be as simple as “gene → happy.” There are probably several layers of causality in between — psychological, neurochemical, societal, and environmental mechanisms that shape how those genetic tendencies play out.
The laptop batteries tend to go bad(either just stop working or expand and become a major fire hazard) after a year or two as they are not built to be fully charged for years on end. I tried doing it twice and that is what happened both times.
Would not recommend; if you want a UPS just buy one, the small ones are not that expensive, like 70 USD.
On my ThinkPad T430, I have a weekly full discharge cycle set up using "tlp recalibrate BAT0", it helps avoid that issue and helps confirm that the battery is still functional.
You cant erase a memory, once you have it you have it. This means that no matter how many other memories you add too to morph and alter the original, the original will allays be there in one form or another.
But people can go from debilitating OCD (meaning hours a day), to a state where they only think about the thing once a week.
It might (and probably will) poop up later in life but even so with such a difference i would call that cured.
COLMAP has been the same for years. It is technically better than most commercial tracking software. But it is buggy(or the gui is) and complicated to use due to strange input and output formats as well as very awkward gui workflow.
And there are wrappers around mega-sam that makes (almost) perfect tracking of any moving video in to a single command. A command that outputs industry standard .abc files as output.
You also have the recently released https://github.com/nv-tlabs/vipe it does not export as .abc but the tracking looks very good.
As i see it the fundamental issue in dyslexia has to do with tokenization and embedding.
The dyslexic brain uses a embedding space that is not very fit for purpose.
Some stuff that is dissimilar get embedded close to each other and some things that should be far from each other gets embedded close to each other.
Downstream networks that try to use these embeddings has a hard time trying to counteract the bad embeddings. The final result is a dyslexic person.