Run around in the radiation, Run around in the acid rain

Mailbox, flooded

In the wake of our scholarly coverage of melanin and vertebrate photosynthesis, the Riddled mailbag has been flooded with letters about melanistic fungi that photosynthesise with gamma rays.* This is not as bad as a literal flood of the mailbox (which only happened once, that time we foolishly did business with the Mail-Order Goldfish of the Month Club) but it is still not a desirable situation. Some replies are in order.

First of all, if a mold (Cryptococcus neoformans) that has adapted to an environment with a high γ-ray flux shows more metabolic activity than a non-adapted mold when exposed to radiation, this could mean that it is using its protective melanin granules to obtain useful energy from the Compton-scattered γ photons, but it could also mean that it is better-adapted to that environment. Another study in the same feckin' paper found that the same mold's growth was also encouraged by ultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengths. No-one could possibly have predicted that warmth would encourage metabolism.

No, Mr Gruntfuttock of Hoxton, here in the Riddled Research Laboratory we do not think that the presence of C. neoformans as an opportunistic lung infection in immunocompromised patients is a sign of evolution towards a new human species that can thrive in the fallout of the post-apocalyptic future. It sounds like a plot device for a J. G. Ballard story. You could try selling the idea to Zombie Ballard, except he has been stealing my Dildo Akvavit again and is currently passed out in the staffroom freezer, covered by the frozen peas and the tray of chops that AK won in last Wednesday's meat raffle at the Old Entomologist.

Nor can we encourage correspondent C. B. Throdwalloper's cunning scheme of growing a symbiotic spacesuit, based on genetic-engineered fungus mycelia, that can wrap around human explorers in hostile environments and protect them from the radiation flux while using the energy to provide the user with oxygen and temperature control. Such suits hybridise with alien life-forms and tear themselves away, leaving the owner to perish miserably. This always happens. It must be a tradition or an old charter or something.

This picture is in fact a still from our cinematic adaption of Philip Dick's Eye in the Sky. E-for-brick is a bistable melanin superconducting switch modeled on one in the Smithsonian. I forget how the monks come into the story (AK wrote that part of the script) but they are certainly not wearing protective fungusuits which they are recharging with the sun's eye-beams so rest assured that no intellectual property has been stolen.

Notice how I have woven in some plot devices from The Third Policeman on account of the similarities between that story and Eye in the Sky. In the foreground, Policeman MacCruiskeen is explaining how it all works by Omnium.

* A single flawed study, hyped energetically by people who cannot always tell the difference between γ- and β-rays.