Awesome Mushrooms

Here’s something we never thought we’d see – mushrooms playing a keyboard. BionicandtheWires put together this strange setup which uses sensors to detect electrical fluctuations in a mushroom plant. It then takes those signals to trigger solenoids that move mallets and strike the keys. And it makes precisely the kind of music we’d expect a group of fungi to make.

The 50 illustrated cards in The Mushroom Compendium (by London’s Kew Royal Botanic Gardens) reveal scientific, cultural, and fantastical details about individual species. Identify the botanical traits of ‘shrooms like ballerina wax caps, barbie pagodas, and stinkhorns. Sections cover micro/macro, saprobe, symbiotic, parasite, useful, weird, and rare.

The latest geeky creation from 3D designer Colby, aka ForgeCore, is a chess board that you can quickly tidy up simply by leaving the pieces on the board and rolling them up into log form. Colby designed the pieces using scans of actual mushrooms. If you sign up for a paid membership, you can download the 3D files for this set and his other creations.

Developed by Good Growing, Gus is a ceramic mushroom planter. It houses the fruiting block that contains the root but lets the rest of the mushroom grow freely outside of the container, either on top or at the side. You can stack up to three units to grow multiples shrooms.

After living years with coffee jitters, MUD/WTR’s organic coffee alternatives are a new daily ritual. They’re made with USA-grown mushroom superfoods like Lion’s Mane, Chaga, and Reishi plus a fungus that grows on caterpillars (I kid you not) and healthy herbs for the original Cacao/Masala Chai, Matcha, Rooibos and Turmeric varieties.

Jens over at Another Perspective spent a year growing various kinds of mushrooms in his basement and filmed their progress. After capturing roughly five terabytes of images, he compiled them into this fascinating three-minute time-lapse video. Is anyone else hungry now?

Director Louie Schwartzberg’s documentary Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath Us takes viewers deep into the underground world of mycelium and mushrooms. Beyond their abilities to feed and heal, it further explores how fungi can be part of massive, interconnected networks.

Unofficial naturalist ZeFrank is here to educate us yet again on one of nature’s stranger creations, a funky fungi that rapidly develops and expands in some of the most extraordinary ways. Not only does it look disgusting, it smells the part too.